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Wildfires Can Now Cross California Mountain Ranges

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Wildfires Can Now Cross California Mountain Ranges

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Just hours before the Caldor fire threatened to level the resort town of South Lake Tahoe, the massive blaze performed a staggering feat: burning from one side of the Sierra to the other.

It seared through crests and valleys, over foothills and ridges - and also at elevations of 8,000 feet or higher.

Ash and smoke rained down on the Tahoe basin and sent thousands fleeing from its soot-darkened shores as the fire skirted a towering granite ridge many believed would be a buffer from the flames. But the fire kept climbing higher, jumping from tree to tree and spewing wind-whipped embers that landed, in some cases, more than a mile away.

Experts said the fire's extreme behavior is part of a worrisome trend driven by the state's warming climate, in which rapid snowmelt and critical dryness are propelling wildfires to ever-higher elevations, scorching terrain that previously was too wet to burn and threatening countless residents.

"What we're seeing is that these fuels at high elevations that typically weren't able to carry a fire now are able to carry fire," said John Abatzoglou, an associate professor of climatology at UC Merced and coauthor of a recent study about wildfires at higher elevations. "That's allowing these fires to effectively reach new heights."

The study, published in June in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that climate warming over the last few decades has exposed an additional 31,400 square miles of U.S. forests to fires at higher elevations.

It also found that between 1984 and 2017, fires in the Sierra Nevada advanced in elevation by more than 1,400 feet, surpassing some previously dependable moisture barriers.

Of the 15 ecological regions researchers studied, the Sierra Nevada was among three that saw the greatest upslope advances, along with the southern and middle Rockies.

"We do see in the Sierra Nevada that fires have increased in terms of their burned area over the past 40 years," Abatzoglou said. "What's novel here is that we're documenting an additional shift in the elevational bands where those fires are occurring."

Before the year 2000, it was rare for a forest in the Sierra Nevada to burn above 8,200 feet, Abatzoglou said. In the years since, there has been an eightfold increase in forested burned areas at that elevation. Both the Caldor fire and the Dixie fire - the state's second-largest wildfire on record - passed that elevation threshold.

One of the most extreme examples, the 2020 Cameron Peak fire in Colorado, blazed at above 12,000 feet elevation and jumped the Continental Divide.

That extreme behavior may partially explain why the Caldor fire was able to jump the granite ridge overlooking the Tahoe basin, Abatzoglou said, noting that parched fuels and hot conditions are providing more "real estate" for fire to progress into higher elevations and reducing physical barriers, such as wetter forests that would resist burning.

It also helps explain how the Caldor and Dixie fires became the first two fires to burn clear through the Sierra.

"Two times in our history, and they're both happening this month," California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection Chief Thom Porter said. "We need to be really cognizant that there is fire activity happening in California that we have never seen before."

Mark Schwartz, a professor emeritus at UC Davis, noted that the Dixie fire expanded rapidly as it crested and came down the east side of the Sierra. It also burned into Lassen Volcanic National Park, where it scaled some elevations of 8,500 feet or higher.

"As fire expands into higher elevations, we run a higher risk of fires going up and over the crest of mountain ranges, then back down the other side," said Schwartz, who co-wrote a 2015 study about the increasing elevation of wildfires in the Sierra Nevada.

Some of the peaks and ridges near South Lake Tahoe are well over 8,000 feet and sparsely populated with fir trees. But dried vegetation is primed for ignition, enabling some fires to climb higher and send more embers aloft.

"This is dangerous," Schwartz said, "because controlling wildfire has often relied on containment at lower elevations, letting fires run out of fuels and fire weather at higher elevations."

There are several factors that could be contributing to this shift, but researchers said the primary cause is the warming trend that is exacerbating the drought and drying out vegetation across the state. The vast majority of high-elevation fires in California are being ignited by lightning - which is more apt to start a fire when it strikes arid vegetation.

"There's a good relationship between how warm and dry the vegetation is across the broader Sierra, and just how high those fires can carry up into these montane systems," Abatzoglou said.

Higher elevations generally have snowpacks that last into June. When those melt, they bring an additional burst of water that keeps the vegetation wet. But with warmer temperatures and an ongoing drought, much of that moisture has disappeared.

On April 1, the date when California's snowpack is typically at its maximum, the California Department of Water Resources recorded only 59% of its average depth. Rain in the Northern and Central Sierra was even lower, at 50% of average, which tied 2021 for the third-driest water year on record.

Mojtaba Sadegh, an assistant professor of civil engineering at Boise State University and another of the fire study's authors, said the region's snowpack is entering into a dangerous cycle with higher-elevation fires.

"These high-elevation mountains are water towers for us," Sadegh said. "Most of our water in the West is coming from that snowpack."

When a fire burns high-elevation trees, it removes some of the canopy shading the snowpack and opens it to more melting sunlight, he explained. That same process also changes the reflectance of the surface, exposing more dark ground and evaporating more water.

It's a cycle that can change both the quantity and the quality of water delivered to the state's reservoirs, he said.

And while warming is the primary driver of the change, both the 2015 and 2021 studies noted that a century of fire suppression in California has allowed an accumulation of vegetation to build up in forests, particularly in lower and middle elevations. When fire does arrive, it has more fuel to carry flames up and potentially over the tops of ridges and mountains.

It's something firefighters have observed as they battle the state's increasingly unpredictable blazes, said Robert Foxworthy, a Cal Fire spokesman. Foxworthy said there's been a "huge deficit" in the snowpack this year, along with massively desiccated vegetation.

The dried-out fuel conditions "are leading to these longer-duration fires, and burning at the higher elevations that we haven't seen years in the past," he said.

And while not every fire will soar to such altitudes, exceedingly high fires often are challenging to fight. Many high-elevation fires are in remote areas, and some of the small towns in those areas offer little infrastructure and few roads for access or evacuation. Firefighters are having to hike farther and higher, often with only the supplies they can carry.

"Very rarely do we have [8,000-] or 9,000-foot elevation and have it be nice and flat," Foxworthy said. "It's usually pretty rugged, steep terrain, so obviously that's going to cause some challenges because that ground is harder to work in."

And it's not only firefighters who are affected by the shift toward more higher-elevation fires. The blazes are also dangerous for the people who live below them; the fires can remove trees that help anchor against avalanches, researchers said.

Experts are increasingly concerned about the implications of these elevation advances, particularly as officials warn that this year's fire season - and those to come - could bring even more extreme behavior.

Schwartz, of UC Davis, said letting fires run uphill has been a sensible approach in the past and has helped protect people and houses at lower elevations. But it is becoming a less secure measure as the state gets hotter and drier, increasing the risk of fire "over-topping" the mountains.

"We may expect to see more of this sort of fire behavior in the future," Schwartz said, "and it dramatically expands the workload of containing a remote wildfire, which is already difficult enough."

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California fires are burning at higher elevations than ever, creating new dangers

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Just hours before the Caldor fire threatened to level the resort town of South Lake Tahoe, the massive blaze performed a staggering feat: burning from one side of the Sierra to the other. It seared through crests and valleys, over foothills and ridges - and also at elevations of 8,000 feet or higher.

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A study in North Carolina of dying trees may represent a foreboding preview of what may come to coastal ecosystems worldwide

smithsonianmag.com

For years, Emily Ury traversed North Carolina's coastal roads, studying patches of skeletal trees slain by rising seas that scientists call "ghost forests." Killed by intruding saltwater along the Atlantic Coast, they are previews of the dire fate other forests face worldwide.

Ury knew that ghost forests were expanding in the region, but only when she began looking down from above using Google Earth did she realize how extensive they were.

"I found so many dead forests," says Ury, an ecologist at Duke University and co-author of a paper on the rapid deforestation of the North Carolina coast published last month in the journal Ecological Applications. "They were everywhere."

As the ocean intrudes and saltwater rises, it kills trees and creates these ghost forests-bare trunks, and stumps, ashen tombstones marking a once-thriving coastal ecosystem. In North Carolina, pine, red maple, sweetgum and bald cypress forests are being replaced by saltmarsh. Eventually, that saltmarsh will be replaced by open water, a shift that leads to significant and complex costs to the environment and the local economy. The loss of forests will reduce carbon storage, further fueling climate change, and the agriculture industry, timber interests will suffer as saltwater moves inland.

To look at the extent of the spread of ghosts forests, Ury turned from Google Earth, which provides only a few years of data, to satellite images taken from 430 miles above the Earth going back more than thirty years. Her team created an algorithm that searched thousands of images for changes in forest coverage focusing on the Alligator National Wildlife Refuge on the Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula, an area of 152,000 acres untouched by logging or development.

The results shocked her. "I was surprised not just by the amount of ghost forest, but the amount of area that was forest in the '80s and no longer is," she says. Between 1985 and 2019, more than 10 percent of the area's tree cover became ghost forest.

The accelerating transformation of healthy forests along North Carolina and the rest of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts are an ominous sign as saltwater marches inland in low-lying places like Vietnam, Mexico, Bangladesh and even Italy, fouling fresh water and destroying rice paddies, farmland and forests.

"What we see here today will happen in other places around the U.S. and around the world in the decades to come," says Matthew Kirwan, an associate professor at the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences, who has been studying the transition from forests to marshes on the Chesapeake Bay for two decades.

While saltwater intrusion killing forests has been studied for nearly two decades, the Duke team's work revealed the process isn't always slow and inexorable. Rapid sea-level rise and extreme events fueled mass deaths across the area.

A five-year drought that began in 2007 weakened an already-stressed forest. Hurricane Irene's storm surge followed, sweeping more than a mile inland and coming before a massive forest fire, both in 2011. Those events, Ury says, created a tipping point that accelerated the rise of ghost forests in the following years. In the year following the hurricane, more than 11,000 acres of ghost forest was created. Over the 35 years, her team studied, more than half the 46,950 acres of forest the refuge occurred in the interior, half a mile from the coast.

The Atlantic Coast is a hotspot for ghost forest research because of its particular geography. The land is sinking so the relative sea-level rise is faster. The low coastal plain means sea level rise intrudes further, and a lack of levees allows saltwater intrusion. Humans have changed the landscape as well by building canals and ditches, which carry saltwater inland during storms and high tides.

Coastal forests giving way to saltmarsh as water intrudes has long been known as a natural process. Dead trees along the margins of estuaries were documented as far back as 1910. Kirwan's research using historical photos and sediment cores reveals that in the Chesapeake Bay region alone more than 150 square miles of forests have converted to marsh since the mid-1800s. Over the past century, he says, the death march of coastal forests retreating inland has accelerated every decade and is now three times faster.

Kirwan grew up walking the coastal forests of the eastern Maryland shore and has been studying saltwater intrusion and marsh migration on the Chesapeake Bay for two decades. Residents there complain about the forest loss, but it happens just slowly enough that they don't realize the changes are accelerating.

Both ecosystems offer benefits. Coastal forests provide timber, agriculture, places to live and some storm protection. Saltwater marshes provide marine and bird habitat, recreation, water filtration and shoreline protection during storm surges.

"From an ecological perspective, I always argue that [migration] is a sign of ecosystem resilience. It's a win or at least a tradeoff, Kirwan says. "But from a human perspective, we're giving up usable farmland, usable forest land and places where people lived 50 years ago-dry land that's no longer inhabitable."

Scientists are still investigating how the loss of coastal forests will affect the climate. Lindsey Smart, a research associate at the North Carolina State University Center for Geospatial Analytics, turned to satellite images and LIDAR (light detection and ranging), which uses laser pulses to map the land, to examine the rise of North Carolina's ghost forests and the effect on carbon storage, a key buffer against global warming. "A really great benefit of healthy coastal forests is that they can sequester and store carbon above ground and below ground," she says. "As coastal forests transition to marsh, we lose this above-ground carbon."

Some carbon is released into the atmosphere and some shifts to other places that store carbon like soils and wetlands. "How much remains uncertain," she adds. "We need more research on that, but we think that leads to a loss in carbon, at least in the near term."

The vast majority of forest land along coastlines in the eastern half of the United States is privately owned. Understanding where, how extensively, and how fast ghost forests are forming and transitioning to saltmarshes is important as localities look to adapt to climate change and preserve the natural resilience they provide.

In many places, coastal forests and saltmarshes bump up against development-seawalls, levees, bulkheads and even lawns-that stops the natural migration inland. When rising seas come up against those hard barriers, the saltwater quickly turns the trapped ecosystems from coastal forest to saltmarsh to open water. Open water doesn't provide the same ecosystem services, including carbon storage and storm protection. Smart says we need to think about providing resources for landowners who want to create adaptations allowing the migration of forests and saltmarshes inland while understanding the negative economic impacts-lost farm and timber lands. In one federal program, for instance, farmers are paid to remove land from production as saltwater intrudes.

"We have this very complex social and ecological challenge," she says. "We need to think creatively about providing appropriate resources for landowners who want to implement adaptation."

The demand for coastal living and the accelerating rate of ecosystem loss has Ury worried that coastal forests and marshes along the Atlantic Coast face a bleak future. Increasingly, she says, fewer and fewer places exist for them to migrate as nature intended.

"There just isn't room because of development and agriculture," Ury says. "These ecosystems are being squeezed out probably to the point of extinction."

About Jim Morrison

Jim Morrison is a freelance writer whose stories, reported from two dozen countries, have appeared in numerous publications including Smithsonian.com, the New York Times, and National Wildlife.

Read more from this author | Follow @jimmor12

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Why Ecologists Are Haunted by the Rapid Growth of Ghost Forests

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smithsonianmag.com For years, Emily Ury traversed North Carolina's coastal roads, studying patches of skeletal trees slain by rising seas that scientists call "ghost forests." Killed by intruding saltwater along the Atlantic Coast, they are previews of the dire fate other forests face worldwide.

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Most Americans favor stricter environmental laws and regulations | Pew Research Center

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Most Americans favor stricter environmental laws and regulations | Pew Research Center

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More Americans say environmental regulations are "worth the cost" than say such regulations come at too steep a price, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. These views come amid speculation about what President-elect Donald Trump's Cabinet nominees may mean for future regulatory policy.

A majority of U.S. adults (59%) say stricter environmental laws and regulations are worth the cost, compared with roughly a third (34%) who say such regulations cost too many jobs and hurt the economy, according to the survey, conducted Nov. 30 to Dec. 5.

Education level and age are both associated with perceptions of environmental regulations. Younger adults and those with more education are more likely than older adults and those with less education to say stricter environmental laws are worth the cost.

Opinion also differs across party lines. Nearly eight-in-ten Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (78%) see stricter environmental laws as worth the cost, while a majority of Republicans and Republican leaners (58%) say stricter environmental regulations cost too many jobs and hurt the economy.

Similar partisan divides were evident in a Pew Research Center survey on views of climate change conducted in spring. On the question of power plant carbon emissions, for example, 76% of liberal Democrats said restrictions can make a big difference in addressing climate change, while only 29% of conservative Republicans agreed. Likewise, 71% of liberal Democrats said an international agreement to limit carbon emissions could make a big difference on climate change, while only 27% of conservative Republicans said the same.

Environmental regulation has gained attention since November's election. Trump has said he would nominate Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to head the Environmental Protection Agency, of which he has been a vocal critic. His team also announced that Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who once favored eliminating the Department of Energy, would be nominated for energy secretary. And Trump said in an interview that " nobody really knows" whether climate change is real. Trump's skepticism on climate science reflects the views of many conservative Republicans, according to the Center's October report on the politics of climate.

While a majority of U.S. adults favor stricter environmental regulations, these views can vary by state, according to a 2014 Pew Research Center survey. Those living in states with relatively high per capita incomes, as well as those living in states that voted for Barack Obama in 2012, are more likely to support stricter environmental regulations than those living in states with lower per-capita incomes and with Republican voting patterns. For example, a majority of residents in Maryland and the District of Columbia - which have high per capita incomes and voted for Obama - say environmental regulations are worth the cost, while residents in the more Republican and lower-income states of Alabama and Kentucky are less likely to agree.

Topics: 2016 Election, Business and Labor, Domestic Affairs and Policy, Energy and Environment, Political Attitudes and Values, Political Polarization

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Most Americans favor stricter environmental laws and regulations

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More Americans say environmental regulations are "worth the cost" than say such regulations come at too steep a price, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. These views come amid speculation about what President-elect Donald Trump's Cabinet nominees may mean for future regulatory policy. A majority of U.S.

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Boreal forests are key players in the global carbon cycle, because they store 30-40% of terrestrial carbon. They have been considered to be carbon sinks, mainly because they accumulate large amounts of carbon in the form of organic soils. Their net carbon balance is driven by natural wildfires (Fig. 1), which produce large carbon emissions approximately every 70 to 200 years, and which are necessary to maintain the productivity and biodiversity of these forests. But climate change is likely to shorten the period between fires (the fire-return interval) by producing warmer temperatures, more lightning strikes, longer wildfire seasons and drier forest conditions than those seen at present. In a paper in Nature, Walker et al. show that the increase in fire frequency might turn boreal forests from carbon sinks into carbon sources.

The cause of this shift is due to the impact of more-frequent fires on legacy carbon - the organic carbon that has escaped earlier fires and has accumulated at the surface of boreal- forest soils. A boreal forest will act as a carbon sink if a fire removes less soil carbon than the amount that accumulated after the previous fire - or, to put it another way, if the soil carbon removed by a fire is younger than the community of trees affected by the fire.

Walker and co-workers used an original method to investigate the origin and age of soil carbon lost in the 2014 fires in black spruce forests in the Northwest Territories of Canada. They estimated the amount of carbon present before and after the fires in organic soil layers overlying mineral soils at 211 forest sites, as well as the carbon emissions produced from the burning of above- and below-ground organic material at those sites. At 32 of the sites, they also analysed the abundance of radioactive carbon-14 isotopes in the organic soil at multiple depths to work out the age of the carbon affected by the fire. This soil-based approach revealed that legacy carbon was lost in young forests at dry sites, whereas old forests at wet sites still accumulated carbon at their surface.

By specifically investigating the type of carbon lost from soil (legacy and non-legacy carbon), rather than just quantifying total emissions, Walker et al. have greatly improved our mechanistic understanding of how fire affects the ability of boreal forests to act as a carbon sink at the landscape scale. Their work also highlights the importance of considering below-ground stores of terrestrial carbon to understand ecosystem responses to climate change.

Walker and colleagues' results suggest that certain boreal forests are about to reach a tipping point in their resilience to fire, beyond which the carbon-storage function of this ecosystem will change. This is a major concern, not only because it will increase the rate at which carbon dioxide is released to the atmosphere, but also because these forests provide multiple benefits. Boreal forests constitute the largest terrestrial biome, with some of the world's largest intact areas of untouched forest, and they harbour unique biodiversity. Moreover, they are sources of timber products and contribute greatly to global air quality and climate regulation. Carbon loss and removal of organic soils by fire will transform this ecosystem, with unknown consequences.

For example, increased fire frequency might alter species composition and biodiversity, and will probably affect soil fertility as a result of carbon removal. Boreal forests could therefore become less productive than they are at present, and more vulnerable to other stresses, such as insect attacks and droughts, which are likely to become more frequent as the climate changes. These effects, in turn, will further decrease the carbon-sink function of boreal forests and adversely affect the economies of countries that rely on timber harvests. Because it is extremely difficult to predict what, when and where changes will happen, these effects present a challenge for forest managers and policymakers.

Walker and co-workers' study demonstrates that there is an intimate link between soils and climate. The authors suggest that the increased frequency of fires in boreal forests is resulting in a positive feedback loop: a higher incidence of fires means that younger forests will be affected, increasing the probability that legacy carbon will be released from soil (assuming that the intensity of the fires does not change). Legacy carbon has been sequestered for hundreds of years; its release would further increase atmospheric CO ₂ concentrations, thereby accelerating climate change.

The effects of wildfires reported by Walker et al. are specific to organic soils that have accumulated large amounts of organic matter because low temperatures and/or high water tables have protected them from microbial decomposition. Such soils are widespread in boreal regions, but are also found in temperate and tropical climates. These organic soils, which contain more than 20% carbon, are very different from the relatively carbon-poor mineral soils that underlie most temperate and tropical forests and grasslands.

Disturbances such as increasing temperatures and fire will trigger much bigger carbon losses from boreal organic soils than from mineral soils in temperate and tropical regions. This is because a large proportion of the organic matter in mineral soils is protected from microbial decomposition by its interaction with soil minerals, preserving it as temperatures increase, and because mineral soils have low heat conductivity, which usually protects organic matter from fire. However, if the organic soil layers of boreal forests are reduced in the future, more attention will need to be paid to the organic carbon in the underlying mineral soils. Mineral soils under boreal forests store substantial amounts of carbon, but Walker et al. did not take this into account in their analysis.

Because of the contrasting processes that protect carbon in organic and mineral soils, different strategies are needed to manage their carbon-sink function. For organic soils, it will be necessary to maintain low temperatures, high moisture levels and low fire-return intervals,. This will require immediate, aggressive reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions from all sectors of society to minimize further increases in atmospheric CO ₂ concentrations and climate change. To improve the carbon-sink function of mineral soils, sustainable management practices for forestry and agriculture must be adopted. In both cases, awareness of the benefits of soil carbon must be raised, and collaboration is needed at all levels from everyone who uses soils, and from those whose activities might damage soils.

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Carbon has been stored in the organic layers of boreal-forest soils for hundreds of years. An analysis reveals that this carbon might be released into the atmosphere as global warming increases the frequency of wildfires. Legacy carbon could be released from boreal forest soils as Earth warms.

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Study bolsters case that climate change is driving many California wildfires - AGU Newsroom

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Study bolsters case that climate change is driving many California wildfires - AGU Newsroom

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15 July 2019

AGU press contact:
Nanci Bompey
+1 (202) 777-7524 (GMT-4) nbompey@agu.org

Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory Press Contact:
Kevin Krajick (GMT-4)
+1 (212) 854-9729
kkrajick@ei.columbia.edu

Contact information for the researchers:
Park Williams, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (GMT-4)
+1 (845) 365-8193 (office)
williams@ldeo.columbia.edu

WASHINGTON - Against a backdrop of long-term rises in temperature in recent decades, California has seen ever higher spikes in seasonal wildfires, and, in the last two years, a string of disastrous, record-setting blazes. This has led scientists, politicians and media to ponder: what role might warming climate be playing here? A new study in AGU's journal Earth's Future combs through the many factors that can promote wildfire, and concludes that in many, though not all, cases, warming climate is the decisive driver. The study finds in particular that the huge summer forest fires that have raked the North Coast and Sierra Nevada regions recently have a strong connection to arid ground conditions brought on by increasing heat. It suggests that wildfires could grow exponentially in the next 40 years, as temperatures continue to rise.

The study notes that average summer temperatures in the state have risen 1.80 degrees Celsius (3.25 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1896, with three-quarters of that increase occurring since the early 1970s. From 1972 to 2018, the area burned annually has shot up fivefold, fueled mainly by a more than eightfold spike in summer forest fires. The researchers say the summer forest-fire increases are driven by a simple mechanism: when air heats up even modestly, it causes more moisture to evaporate from soils and vegetation. The result: fires start more easily, and can spread faster and farther. During the fall, and in non-forested areas, different dynamics may be at work and the results are less clear; but the researchers project that climate-driven aridity is likely to play a growing role there as well.

"It's not a surprise to see that climate has this effect in forests, but California is so big and so variable, there is no one-size-fits-all explanation for how climate might affect wildfires across the board," said the study's lead author, Park Williams, a bioclimatologist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. "We have tried to provide one-stop shopping to show people how climate has or, in some cases, hasn't affected fire activity."

Williams and his colleagues have already shown in a 2016 study that heightened temperatures and resulting aridity on the ground has doubled the area burned in forest fires over wider areas of the U.S. West in past decades. The premise that warmer air draws moisture from the ground level - a phenomenon known as vapor pressure deficit - is already well established. However, many confounding factors can shift fire risk up or down, and so it is not always possible to measure the effects of vapor pressure deficit. In California, human infrastructure is sprawling into forests, introducing more chances for people to both cause fires and suffer from them. And a century of efforts to suppress virtually all fires has led to a buildup of flammable materials in many forests. On the other hand, fragmentation of forest landscapes by human intrusion may in some cases limit the spread of fires. Rainfall and snow can vary year to year, sometimes adding to fire risk, sometimes subtracting. And areas dominated by shrubs or grasses instead of trees may not react the same way.

The researchers combined data from many sources, some of it going back more than 100 years. They found that growing temperature-induced vapor pressure deficit accounted for nearly all the growth in forest fires from 1972-2018. In 2017, a modern state record was set for the largest individual wildfire (more than 285,000 acres) and the most destructive (5,636 structures burned, 22 people killed). 2018 saw a new record for total annual area burned (almost 1.7 million acres), and the 2017 records were broken for the biggest individual fire (the Mendocino Complex fire, which took out 464,500 acres) and the most destructive: the Camp Fire, which burned 18,804 structures and killed 85 people. The Camp Fire leveled almost the entire forest community of Paradise.

"The ability of dry fuels to promote large fires is non-linear, which has allowed warming to become increasingly impactful," says the study. "Human-caused warming has already significantly enhanced wildfire activity in California, particularly in the forests of the Sierra Nevada and the North Coast, and will likely continue to do so in the coming decades."

That said, the authors note that the effects of climate are highly seasonal, and can vary depending on vegetation type, topography and human settlement patterns across California's highly diverse landscape. In summer, they found that summer fires did not increase in many non-forested areas dominated by grasses or shrubs. This, they say, was probably due to a combination of intense firefighting and prevention efforts, and reduced vegetation due to drought. In fall, destructive fires have grown, but because the dynamics of this season are complex, the effects of warming climate are not as obvious - at least not yet. The researchers say fall fires are driven in large part by powerful winds sweeping from the highland interior, as well as the amount and timing of precipitation, which tends to pick up around this time of year. These factors wax and wane from year to year, perhaps masking the effect of overall warming. But that effect is indeed just starting to show up in fall, and is likely to become more evident in the future, says Williams.

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Notes for Journalists
This paper open access. Journalists and public information officers (PIOs) can download a PDF copy of the article by clicking on this link:
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/2019EF001210

Journalists and PIOs may also request a copy of the final paper by emailing Nanci Bompey at nbompey@agu.org. Please provide your name, the name of your publication, and your phone number.

Neither this paper nor this press release is under embargo.

Paper Title
"Observed impacts of anthropogenic climate change on wildfire in California"

Park Williams: Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, Palisades, NY, USA;
Pierre Gentine: Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA;
Max Moritz: Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA;
Dar Roberts: Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA;
John Abatzoglou: Department of Geography, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID, USA.

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Study bolsters case that climate change is driving many California wildfires - AGU Newsroom

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AGU press contact: Nanci Bompey +1 (202) 777-7524 (GMT-4) nbompey@agu.org Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory Press Contact: Kevin Krajick (GMT-4) +1 (212) 854-9729 kkrajick@ei.columbia.edu Contact information for the researchers: Park Williams, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (GMT-4) +1 (845) 365-8193 (office) williams@ldeo.columbia.edu WASHINGTON - Against a backdrop of long-term rises in temperature in recent decades, California has seen ever higher spikes in seasonal wildfires, and, in the last two years, a string of disastrous, record-setting blazes.

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Humans Are Speeding Extinction and Altering the Natural World at an ‘Unprecedented’ Pace - The New York Times

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Humans Are Speeding Extinction and Altering the Natural World at an ‘Unprecedented’ Pace - The New York Times

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Image

Fishing nets and ropes are a frequent hazard for olive ridley sea turtles, seen on a beach in India's Kerala state in January. A new 1,500-page report by the United Nations is the most exhaustive look yet at the decline in biodiversity across the globe. Credit Credit Soren Andersson/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

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WASHINGTON - Humans are transforming Earth's natural landscapes so dramatically that as many as one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, posing a dire threat to ecosystems that people all over the world depend on for their survival, a sweeping new United Nations assessment has concluded.

The 1,500-page report, compiled by hundreds of international experts and based on thousands of scientific studies, is the most exhaustive look yet at the decline in biodiversity across the globe and the dangers that creates for human civilization. A summary of its findings, which was approved by representatives from the United States and 131 other countries, was released Monday in Paris. The full report is set to be published this year.

Its conclusions are stark. In most major land habitats, from the savannas of Africa to the rain forests of South America, the average abundance of native plant and animal life has fallen by 20 percent or more, mainly over the past century. With the human population passing 7 billion, activities like farming, logging, poaching, fishing and mining are altering the natural world at a rate "unprecedented in human history."

At the same time, a new threat has emerged: Global warming has become a major driver of wildlife decline, the assessment found, by shifting or shrinking the local climates that many mammals, birds, insects, fish and plants evolved to survive in. When combined with the other ways humans are damaging the environment, climate change is now pushing a growing number of species, such as the Bengal tiger, closer to extinction.

As a result, biodiversity loss is projected to accelerate through 2050, particularly in the tropics, unless countries drastically step up their conservation efforts.

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Cattle grazing on a tract of illegally cleared Amazon forest in Pará State, Brazil. In most major land habitats, the average abundance of native plant and animal life has fallen by 20 percent or more, mainly over the past century. Credit Lalo de Almeida for The New York Times

The report is not the first to paint a grim portrait of Earth's ecosystems. But it goes further by detailing how closely human well-being is intertwined with the fate of other species.

"For a long time, people just thought of biodiversity as saving nature for its own sake," said Robert Watson, chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, which conducted the assessment at the request of national governments. "But this report makes clear the links between biodiversity and nature and things like food security and clean water in both rich and poor countries."

A previous report by the group had estimated that, in the Americas, nature provides some $24 trillion of non-monetized benefits to humans each year. The Amazon rain forest absorbs immense quantities of carbon dioxide and helps slow the pace of global warming. Wetlands purify drinking water. Coral reefs sustain tourism and fisheries in the Caribbean. Exotic tropical plants form the basis of a variety of medicines.

But as these natural landscapes wither and become less biologically rich, the services they can provide to humans have been dwindling.

Humans are producing more food than ever, but land degradation is already harming agricultural productivity on 23 percent of the planet's land area, the new report said. The decline of wild bees and other insects that help pollinate fruits and vegetables is putting up to $577 billion in annual crop production at risk. The loss of mangrove forests and coral reefs along coasts could expose up to 300 million people to increased risk of flooding.

The authors note that the devastation of nature has become so severe that piecemeal efforts to protect individual species or to set up wildlife refuges will no longer be sufficient. Instead, they call for "transformative changes" that include curbing wasteful consumption, slimming down agriculture's environmental footprint and cracking down on illegal logging and fishing.

"It's no longer enough to focus just on environmental policy," said Sandra M. Díaz, a lead author of the study and an ecologist at the National University of Córdoba in Argentina. "We need to build biodiversity considerations into trade and infrastructure decisions, the way that health or human rights are built into every aspect of social and economic decision-making."

Scientists have cataloged only a fraction of living creatures, some 1.3 million; the report estimates there may be as many as 8 million plant and animal species on the planet, most of them insects. Since 1500, at least 680 species have blinked out of existence, including the Pinta giant tortoise of the Galápagos Islands and the Guam flying fox.

Though outside experts cautioned it could be difficult to make precise forecasts, the report warns of a looming extinction crisis, with extinction rates currently tens to hundreds of times higher than they have been in the past 10 million years.

"Human actions threaten more species with global extinction now than ever before," the report concludes, estimating that "around 1 million species already face extinction, many within decades, unless action is taken."

Unless nations step up their efforts to protect what natural habitats are left, they could witness the disappearance of 40 percent of amphibian species, one-third of marine mammals and one-third of reef-forming corals. More than 500,000 land species, the report said, do not have enough natural habitat left to ensure their long-term survival.

Over the past 50 years, global biodiversity loss has primarily been driven by activities like the clearing of forests for farmland, the expansion of roads and cities, logging, hunting, overfishing, water pollution and the transport of invasive species around the globe.

In Indonesia, the replacement of rain forest with palm oil plantations has ravaged the habitat of critically endangered orangutans and Sumatran tigers. In Mozambique, ivory poachers helped kill off nearly 7,000 elephants between 2009 and 2011 alone. In Argentina and Chile, the introduction of the North American beaver in the 1940s has devastated native trees (though it has also helped other species thrive, including the Magellanic woodpecker).

All told, three-quarters of the world's land area has been significantly altered by people, the report found, and 85 percent of the world's wetlands have vanished since the 18th century.

And with humans continuing to burn fossil fuels for energy, global warming is expected to compound the damage. Roughly 5 percent of species worldwide are threatened with climate-related extinction if global average temperatures rise 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, the report concluded. (The world has already warmed 1 degree.)

"If climate change were the only problem we were facing, a lot of species could probably move and adapt," Richard Pearson, an ecologist at the University College of London, said. "But when populations are already small and losing genetic diversity, when natural landscapes are already fragmented, when plants and animals can't move to find newly suitable habitats, then we have a real threat on our hands."

The dwindling number of species will not just make the world a less colorful or wondrous place, the report noted. It also poses risks to people.

Volunteers collected trash in March in a mangrove forest in Brazil. The loss of mangrove forests and coral reefs along coasts could expose up to 300 million people to increased risk of flooding. Credit Amanda Perobelli/Reuters

Today, humans are relying on significantly fewer varieties of plants and animals to produce food. Of the 6,190 domesticated mammal breeds used in agriculture, more than 559 have gone extinct and 1,000 more are threatened. That means the food system is becoming less resilient against pests and diseases. And it could become harder in the future to breed new, hardier crops and livestock to cope with the extreme heat and drought that climate change will bring.

"Most of nature's contributions are not fully replaceable," the report said. Biodiversity loss "can permanently reduce future options, such as wild species that might be domesticated as new crops and be used for genetic improvement."

The report does contain glimmers of hope. When governments have acted forcefully to protect threatened species, such as the Arabian oryx or the Seychelles magpie robin, they have managed to fend off extinction in many cases. And nations have protected more than 15 percent of the world's land and 7 percent of its oceans by setting up nature reserves and wilderness areas.

Still, only a fraction of the most important areas for biodiversity have been protected, and many nature reserves poorly enforce prohibitions against poaching, logging or illegal fishing. Climate change could also undermine existing wildlife refuges by shifting the geographic ranges of species that currently live within them.

So, in addition to advocating the expansion of protected areas, the authors outline a vast array of changes aimed at limiting the drivers of biodiversity loss.

Farmers and ranchers would have to adopt new techniques to grow more food on less land. Consumers in wealthy countries would have to waste less food and become more efficient in their use of natural resources. Governments around the world would have to strengthen and enforce environmental laws, cracking down on illegal logging and fishing and reducing the flow of heavy metals and untreated wastewater into the environment.

The authors also note that efforts to limit global warming will be critical, although they caution that the development of biofuels to reduce emissions could end up harming biodiversity by further destroying forests.

An elephant in the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy at the foot of Mount Kenya, outside Nairobi. More than 500,000 land species do not have enough natural habitat left to ensure their long-term survival. Credit Tony Karumba/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

None of this will be easy, especially since many developing countries face pressure to exploit their natural resources as they try to lift themselves out of poverty.

But, by detailing the benefits that nature can provide to people, and by trying to quantify what is lost when biodiversity plummets, the scientists behind the assessment are hoping to help governments strike a more careful balance between economic development and conservation.

"You can't just tell leaders in Africa that there can't be any development and that we should turn the whole continent into a national park," said Emma Archer, who led the group's earlier assessment of biodiversity in Africa. "But we can show that there are trade-offs, that if you don't take into account the value that nature provides, then ultimately human well-being will be compromised."

In the next two years, diplomats from around the world will gather for several meetings under the Convention on Biological Diversity, a global treaty, to discuss how they can step up their efforts at conservation. Yet even in the new report's most optimistic scenario, through 2050 the world's nations would only slow the decline of biodiversity - not stop it.

"At this point," said Jake Rice, a fisheries scientist who led an earlier report on biodiversity in the Americas, "our options are all about damage control."

For more news on climate and the environment, follow @NYTClimate on Twitter.

Brad Plumer is a reporter covering climate change, energy policy and other environmental issues for The Times's climate team. @bradplumer

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Wildlife Facing Extinction Risk All Over Globe. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Humans Are Speeding Extinction and Altering the Natural World at an 'Unprecedented' Pace

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Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd: , our email newsletter. WASHINGTON - Humans are transforming Earth's natural landscapes so dramatically that as many as one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, posing a dire threat to ecosystems that people all over the world depend on for their survival, a sweeping new United Nations assessment has concluded.

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Here's What We Know about Wildfires and Climate Change - Scientific American

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Here's What We Know about Wildfires and Climate Change - Scientific American

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As deadly wildfires rage across California's wine country, leaving at least 29 dead and a trail of destruction in their wake, the influence of climate change is again being questioned.

Just Monday, Hillary Clinton delivered a speech at the University of California, Davis, in which she noted that "it's been a tough couple of weeks with hurricanes and earthquakes and now these terrible fires" (Climatewire, Oct. 12).

"So in addition to expressing our sympathy, we need to really come together to try to work to prevent and mitigate, and that starts with acknowledging climate change and the role that it plays in exacerbating such events," she added.

While there's growing interest in investigating the fingerprints of climate change on extreme weather events, it's often challenging for scientists to parse out its influence versus other natural and human factors-and, as experts have warned time and again, no single weather event can be attributed solely to the effects of climate change. This may be particularly true for wildfires, which are heavily influenced by human land-use and management practices in addition to the weather.

Still, scientists are increasingly suggesting that climate change has already had a hand in shaping fire seasons, not just in California but elsewhere around the world, and will likely continue to play a major role. These are a few of the major climate-related factors that may be at play.

Rising temperatures make vegetation drier

Plants take in carbon dioxide, which they need to survive, through tiny pores in their leaves called stomates. But they also lose water through these same pores every time they open-and the higher the ambient temperature, the more water they lose. Warmer weather can also cause more water to evaporate from dead plants littering the ground.

"A warmer world will have drier fuels," said Mike Flannigan, director of the Western Partnership for Wildland Fire Science at the University of Alberta in Canada. "Drier fuels will mean it's easier for fires to start and spread."

A study published last year in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that climate change has already played a significant role in making forests in the western U.S. drier and more likely to burn, nearly doubling the area affected by forest fires over the last three decades.

At the same time, there's a great deal of scientific debate about the influence of climate change on droughts around the world. In some places, California included, some scientists have suggested that future climate change may lead to an increase in the frequency or intensity of droughts-but there's still considerable uncertainty about how these changes will unfold. In some places, climate projections predict an increase in both drought and extreme precipitation events, suggesting more intense rainfall punctuated by longer or drier periods in between.

What this would mean for fire seasons may still be unclear. But Flannigan suggests that an increase in heavy rainfall events may not be enough to offset the effects of steadily rising temperatures, especially if they're accompanied by an increase in dry periods.

"You only need a week of hot, dry, windy weather before you can have a raging inferno," he said. "You don't need very much time."

More lightning provides the spark

Fires get started in one of two ways-by humans or lightning. Both are growing in number. Lightning strikes may become more frequent in some places due to climate change.

Generally, lightning occurs more frequently in hot weather than cold weather. A 2014 study in the journal Science anticipates that the number of lightning strikes in the United States could increase by about 12 percent for every degree Celsius of warming.

Other research has suggested that lightning-driven fires are already becoming more frequent in some places. A study published earlier this year in Nature Climate Change found that lightning ignitions in North America's northern boreal forests have increased since 1975. And the researchers say that future warming may cause more storms, more lightning and potentially more fires in the northern regions.

Earlier springs extend the fire season

Rising temperatures don't just increase the chance that a fire will start at any given time-they also lengthen the total time throughout the year that conditions are right for wildfires. Recent research shows that spring is arriving earlier and earlier in many places, based on the timing of snowmelt and the re-emergence of vegetation.

Last year, an analysis released by the USA-National Phenology Network pointed out that spring had arrived up to three weeks early throughout the southeastern United States. Another study in Ecosphere from last year concluded that three-quarters of the nation's national parks have seen an advance in the timing of spring over the last century. Other recent research from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has suggested that spring is coming about eight days earlier in the northern forests of North America and Eurasia than it did three decades ago.

Earlier springs mean more than just a longer warm season. In colder regions, this also means that snow is melting sooner. That's an important freshwater resource in many high-latitude or mountainous regions. But if snow melts too early, the water may dry up before it gets cold again and increase the potential for drought-and, thus, drier fuel for fires. Last year's devastating wildfire in Alberta coincided with the lowest area of snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere in any April over the last 50 years.

Climate change can affect the winds that drive fires

Multiple experts pointed out that the fires in California are fanned by seasonal strong, dry winds known as Diablo winds in Northern California and Santa Ana winds in the south. Researchers say these winds may cause more burning in the future.

As Grist's Eric Holthaus recently noted, a 2015 paper in Environmental Research Letters found that climate models predict more intense Santa Ana wind events are on the way. The researchers say the total area at risk of being burned by Santa Ana fires by midcentury could increase more than 60 percent.

This research is specific to California, and the same changes in wind conditions may not necessarily occur in other fire-prone regions. But the study does emphasize the idea that other weather conditions, outside of temperature and moisture, are still important factors in the outbreak of wildfires and may be influenced by climate change.

More fires could contribute to a dangerous climate feedback loop

Some scientists are also concerned that if wildfires become more frequent or intense, the carbon emissions they release could exacerbate the progression of climate change, leading to a kind of feedback loop-more warming leads to more fires, which release more carbon, which causes more warming, and so on.

This is of particular concern for boreal forests in North American and Eurasia, which contain heavy deposits of carbon-rich peat, according to Flannigan. "One good fire that burns a meter or two [deep] could release many thousands of years of carbon accumulation in one blast," he said.

Many uncertainties remain

It's important to note that these are all ways that climate change could affect future fire seasons all over the world-but there are considerable uncertainties about the ways these changes would actually unfold.

First, while the above factors-temperature, moisture, wind, lightning-are generally significant in fire seasons all over the world, the effects of climate change will certainly not be identical everywhere.

Additionally, wildfires, perhaps more than any other type of natural disaster, are heavily subject to the influence of human land use-the types of vegetation we plant or clear away, how often we allow it to burn, and how we choose to manage fires once they start. These types of decisions could both mitigate or exacerbate the intensity of future fire seasons, the effects of climate change notwithstanding.

And while the fires continue to blaze in California, it's also important to remember that no single event can be attributed solely to the effects of global warming. Rather, as Clinton noted in her speech, climate change may simply exacerbate these events-in what ways and to what extent, scientists are still discovering.
Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from E&E News. E&E provides daily coverage of essential energy and environmental news at www.eenews.net.

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Here's What We Know about Wildfires and Climate Change

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As deadly wildfires rage across California's wine country, leaving at least 29 dead and a trail of destruction in their wake, the influence of climate change is again being questioned. Just Monday, Hillary Clinton delivered a speech at the University of California, Davis, in which she noted that "it's been a tough couple of weeks with hurricanes and earthquakes and now these terrible fires" (Climatewire , Oct.

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Rising Waters Are Drowning Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor

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Rising Waters Are Drowning Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor

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From Apples to Popcorn, Climate Change Is Altering the Foods America Grows - The New York Times

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From Apples to Popcorn, Climate Change Is Altering the Foods America Grows - The New York Times

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In every region, farmers and scientists are trying to adapt an array of crops to warmer temperatures, invasive pests, erratic weather and earlier growing seasons.

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Credit Credit MSJONESNYC

The impact may not yet be obvious in grocery stores and greenmarkets, but behind the organic apples and bags of rice and cans of cherry pie filling are hundreds of thousands of farmers, plant breeders and others in agriculture who are scrambling to keep up with climate change.

Drop a pin anywhere on a map of the United States and you'll find disruption in the fields. Warmer temperatures are extending growing seasons in some areas and sending a host of new pests into others. Some fields are parched with drought, others so flooded that they swallow tractors.

Decades-long patterns of frost, heat and rain - never entirely predictable but once reliable enough - have broken down. In regions where the term climate change still meets with skepticism, some simply call the weather extreme or erratic. But most agree that something unusual is happening.

"Farming is no different than gambling," said Sarah Frey, whose collection of farms throughout the South and the Midwest grows much of the nation's crop of watermelons and pumpkins. "You're putting thousands if not millions of dollars into the earth and hoping nothing catastrophic happens, but it's so much more of a gamble now. You have all of these consequences that farmers weren't expecting."

Because the system required to feed the country is complex and intertwined, a two- or three-week shift in a growing season can upset supply chains, labor schedules and even the hidden mechanics of agriculture, like the routes that honeybees travel to pollinate fields. Higher temperatures and altered growing seasons are making new crops possible in places where they weren't before, but that same heat is also hurting traditional crops. Early rains, unexpected droughts and late freezes leave farmers uncertain over what comes next.

Here are 11 everyday foods, from all over the country, that are facing big changes:

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Weather has always been a challenge in northern Michigan, but never - at least as far back as tart-cherry growers can remember - has it been this frustrating. Tart cherries are a small, delicate crop that bakers prefer to use fresh for pies, although most are frozen, dried or processed into juice or canned filling. Growers rely on a long, cold winter and a slow, cool spring so trees won't bud and bloom before the threat of a final freeze is over. But lately, Grand Traverse Bay hasn't been freezing over reliably, so warmer temperatures arrive too soon. There have been two total crop failures in a decade; the last one before that was in 1945. Spring weather has become more violent, too, pummeling trees with hail and winds.

The spotted wing Drosophila, an invasive fruit fly, showed up in 2010, and many farmers believe it is spreading quickly as a result of shifting climate patterns. It lays eggs in the fruit, and its larvae feed inside, ruining the cherry; so far it seems impossible to control. A team of researchers is trying to develop a cherry tree that blooms 20 days later, but with fruit that ripens at the same time as it does now. Still, a solution is years away. That may be too late for some of the 425 families who grow tart cherries. Already, there is talk among some families of abandoning the cherry business altogether, said Dr. Nikki Rothwell, coordinator of the Northwest Michigan Horticultural Research Center. "The stress is becoming too much for many of the growers," she said.

The fruit fly that is vexing cherry growers in Michigan is also attacking the raspberry crop in New York State. Winters haven't been as long or as cold, so the flies are appearing earlier; organic fruit are especially at risk because farmers are limited in using pesticides. Unlike other flies that feed on rotting fruit, the spotted wing Drosophila, which by 2011 had arrived in significant numbers in upstate New York, has a tiny saw near its abdomen that allows it to cut into fruit that is just ready to be picked. The raspberries, already delicate, can end up infested with larvae, and turn to goo by the time a customer gets them home.

Couple that with mild winters that don't kill off pests, and unusual weather patterns that don't bring rain when they should - or bring so much that farmers can't get into the fields to work or have to battle fungus - and organic berries aren't such a good bet anymore. "People have really given up on raspberries on a lot of farms," said Alissa White, a researcher at the University of Vermont who tracks the impact of climate change on Northeastern farms. "Farmers are the kings of risk management. Once every 10 or 20 years we could lose a crop. But if once every three or four, that's a lot."

Warmer weather and an increasingly earlier growing season have, in many ways, been good for farmers like Sarah Frey. She used to start harvesting her South Florida watermelons in mid-April. This year, crews were picking in March. She'll be picking earlier in South Georgia, and expects to pull watermelons from fields in Missouri by the Fourth of July, which she said was rare when she was growing up in the 1990s.

But earlier and longer growing seasons have consequences. For Ms. Frey, harvesting watermelons earlier than usual puts her into competition with the late-winter crop from Mexico. And new, more restrictive immigration policies could mean she won't have enough workers from Mexico to work the fields when she needs them - especially because many American produce growers are starting or expanding operations in Mexico. "Having it earlier is good for customers and good for business, but if it's overlapping with the import business and I can't get enough workers to harvest, that's a problem," she said.

The chickpea is enjoying an unexpected assist from extreme weather. Farmers in Montana, who grow about 60 percent of the chickpeas produced in the United States, are being encouraged to plant more as a hedge against heat and drought. The average annual temperature in Montana has increased by 2.4 degrees over the last century, but the amount of rain hasn't changed much.

Chickpeas, which need less water to grow than wheat and other cereal grains that are the mainstay of Montana agriculture, provide an antidote. They improve soil and help reduce the need for fertilizer; rotating in a spring crop of chickpeas before a wheat crop can help break disease and pest cycles, said Kevin McPhee, a professor at Montana State University. It also doesn't hurt that hummus is so popular, opening up new markets. Still, all the new chickpea growers face tough competition globally. India, which imports huge amounts of American chickpeas, protected its own producers with stiff tariffs in 2018, and China and the European Union have responded to recent United States trade tariffs with their own.

The wild blueberry has long been an essential player in Maine agriculture, but unpredictable weather is challenging the 44,000 acres where the commercial low-bush berries grow. The season has stretched out four weeks longer, and summers are becoming warmer. Temperatures last year reached an unprecedented 95 degrees, said Dr. Lily Calderwood, an extension wild blueberry specialist at the University of Maine.

Frosts are becoming erratic, too. A frost in the spring can kill blossoms that would have become fruit. "We didn't used to have these unpredictable events," Dr. Calderwood said. "We could rely on gradual and reliable growing seasons. Now it's all starting to skip around, and these frost events come out of the blue." Drought isn't helping. Many smaller growers, some tending fields that are 100 years old, don't irrigate, but that expensive step may become necessary. And the same fruit fly troubling cherry and raspberry growers in Northern states is also a concern in Maine.

Gene Mealhow comes from a family that lost its farmland in the 1980s. Now he grows pearly flint popcorn, whose genetics he can trace back to the 1840s, on about 300 acres in Illinois and Iowa. When he was growing up, predictable spring rains led to even summer heat and a reliable crop of corn. "Now when it rains, it comes down four of five inches at a pop, or we've got tornado warnings," he said. "Believe me, the weather is so extreme."

This season, some of Iowa's big corn producers face land so soaked with rain that they have to leave crops in the field; recent floods turned the Missouri River into a monster. But not all of Iowa is in trouble, Mr. Mealhow said. Some parts of the state produced bumper crops last year. His little pocket of land near Shellsburg in eastern Iowa hasn't been hit as hard, either. Still, he's doing what many small farmers are: diversifying. He'll work through his existing inventory of popcorn, which he sells under the Tiny But Mighty brand to stores like Whole Foods Market, and just grow some for seed. The rest of his energy will go into growing onions, sweet corn and tomatoes for restaurants in Iowa City and Cedar Rapids. Next year, perhaps, there will be more popcorn. "Everybody is still optimistic," he said.

The symbol of Georgia and the mainstay of a Southern kitchen, peaches could be devastated by climate change. They need a certain amount of consistent cold weather - what growers call chill hours - followed by dependably warm weather. Without enough chill hours, peach buds are weak, and weak buds make poor fruit.

In addition, trees are blooming too early and then being hit by unusual frosts, which result in less sellable fruit. In 2017, a warm winter destroyed almost 85 percent of the state's $30 million peach crop. It's part of a pattern noted last year in the federally mandated National Climate Assessment, which predicted that it would continue. In response, researchers at places like Clemson University are trying to find new peach strains that can handle the shift, but new cultivars are still years away.

Most organic apples in the American grocery store come from Washington State, which grows about 230,000 tons a year. Apples don't have the same worries about chill hours that softer fruits like peaches do, but they are being threatened by climate change in their own way. One problem that comes with hotter spring weather is an increase in diseases like fire blight, which can be especially hard to prevent in organic orchards where antibiotics can't be used, said Kate Prengaman, associate editor of Good Fruit Grower, a Washington-based magazine for tree fruit and grape farmers.

Hotter temperatures can subject both organic and conventionally grown apples to sunburn, which causes defects on the fruit's skin. Some growers have taken to installing large nets over orchards to reduce the intensity of the sunlight, but the process is expensive. Unlike many row crops, which can be replanted from year to year, orchards can take a decade or two to regrow, and farmers expect them to produce for at least a generation.

As warmer weather endangers traditional Texas crops like peaches and pears, some growers have been enticed by exotic fruit like the golden kiwi fruit, a less fuzzy, sweeter and more nutritious cousin of the more common green species. The first golden kiwi crop was harvested in East Texas in 2014 using cultivars from Auburn University in Alabama, and enthusiastic researchers like Dr. David Creech have been growing increasingly larger crops every year. The humidity and acidic soil of East Texas seem like a perfect match for this potentially lucrative crop.

But Tim Hartmann, an extension horticulturalist at Texas A&M University, said kiwi fruit are sensitive to cold weather. Finding the right amount of chill hours - the cold weather that kiwis need to produce - and dodging freezes make the task difficult. "You would think that with temperatures warming up, a subtropical place like Texas would predispose it as a suitable area for subtropical crops," he said. "But we've noticed that as the climate changes and the weather is getting erratic, the freezes we get are more unpredictable."

When the chef Mary Sue Milliken started noticing artichokes in her favorite Los Angeles farmers' market in December, all she could think about was climate change. The weather in Castroville, long the epicenter of California artichoke country, has shifted in a state where agriculture is feeling the impact of climate change more than any other.

The classic California artichoke, with its spring growing season, likes cool, overcast weather that comes when heat from the Central Valley pulls in cool marine air from the Pacific Ocean. But the ocean has been warming, and the marine layer has been less reliable, said Pat Hopper, manager of the California Artichoke Advisory Board. And warmer weather has improved conditions for pests like the artichoke plume moth. As a result, artichoke growers have developed new seed that grows well in the desert heat of Coachella, 450 miles south, which puts California artichokes in the market almost year-round. "We're in a time of change," Ms. Hopper said. "The biggest thing consumers are going to see are higher prices. It's just a result of higher costs all the way around to make things grow."

About 1.2 million acres of farmland are planted with rice in Arkansas, which grows about half of the country's supply. And that rice needs a lot of water. But changing weather patterns produce less rain during the growing season, and the underground aquifers that feed the state's crop are drying out. "The rice industry as we've known it is not sustainable," said Dr. Anna Myers McClung of the Dale Bumpers National Rice Research Center in Stuttgart, Ark.

Higher temperatures are another culprit. Too much heat alters the starch that the plants produce. Long-grain rice that should look translucent becomes chalky and cooks up stickier. It breaks apart more easily at the mill, causing waste. In response, some farmers are building reservoirs or experimenting with new, less water-intensive growing methods. Researchers like Dr. McClung are working with genetics to find strains of rice that are better adapted to the changing climate and more drought-tolerant. But developing a new variety, she said, could take five to 10 years.

More on Food and Climate Change

Kim Severson is a Southern-based correspondent who covers the nation's food culture and contributes to NYT Cooking. She has written four books and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for public service for reporting on workplace sexual harassment. @kimseverson * Facebook

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From Apples to Popcorn, Climate Change Is Altering the Foods America Grows

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In every region, farmers and scientists are trying to adapt an array of crops to warmer temperatures, invasive pests, erratic weather and earlier growing seasons. The impact may not yet be obvious in grocery stores and greenmarkets, but behind the organic apples and bags of rice and cans of cherry pie filling are hundreds of thousands of farmers, plant breeders and others in agriculture who are scrambling to keep up with climate change.

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Chronicles of the Rings: What Trees Tell Us - The New York Times

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Chronicles of the Rings: What Trees Tell Us - The New York Times

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A tree sample from the Mediterranean at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona campus in Tucson. Credit Credit Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

Studying the historical data stored in centuries-old trees is a burgeoning field, with labs around the world learning more about historical patterns of weather and climate and the effects on humans.

A tree sample from the Mediterranean at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona campus in Tucson. Credit Credit Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

TUCSON - From the early 1700s until the 1960s, the fast moving river of wind known as the North Atlantic Jet Stream, which drives weather extremes over Europe, was pretty steady on its course.

Then it became less predictable. But instrument data alone can't tell the jet stream's movements for comparison over the centuries, given that scientists began keeping records of weather events via instruments only in the late 19th century.

The rings of trees, however, offer a far more complete historical picture of climate variations. As they age, trees grow outward from the center, and each year a new, distinct circle of dead wood is created around the trunk of most trees. In that ring, one can find information about precipitation, temperature and other data about that year.

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Kiyomi Morino, a research associate at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona, during a field sampling on Mount Bigelow, in the Santa Catalina Mountains. Credit Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

A team led by Valerie Trouet, a dendrochronologist, sampled 400 trees from the Balkans and 200 in Scotland - including what might be the oldest known tree in Europe, a Bosnian pine in Greece named Adonis, which is 1,075 years old. The jet stream flows between these two regions, and trees revealed the range of temperatures in their rings and the frequency of fires over time, an expansive chronicling of jet stream behavior.

"More extreme positions create more extreme climate events, especially heat waves and storms," in Europe, Dr. Trouet said. And the tree rings show "big fires happen in the Balkans when the jet is in its southerly position."

The fact that the stream has become more variable only in recent decades suggests that the shift is the result of humans' effects on climate, Dr. Trouet said. "The recent rise in variance is unprecedented in 300 years," she said. More analysis is underway to look back to even earlier centuries.

Reading the climate stories these trees tell will help with forecasting. "One of the big questions in the field is what's going to happen to the jet stream," said Dr. Trouet. "This data helps the modeling of climate change become more reliable."

Trees, it seems, are giant organic recording devices that contain information about past climate, civilizations, ecosystems and even galactic events, much of it many thousands of years old.

In recent years, the techniques for extracting information from tree rings has been honed and expanded. New technologies and techniques are able to pry a much deeper and wider range of information out of trees.

The field "has exploded," Edward Cook, director of the tree ring lab at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said.

The Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research here at the University of Arizona was founded in the 1930s by A.E. Douglass, an astronomer who turned to trees to better understand the connection between sunspots and climate.

A tree core sample extracted by Mr. Morino. Credit Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

The lab has helped establish other labs around the world, which in turn has rapidly increased the number of studied trees. There are now roughly a dozen large labs globally and data from 4,000 sites on all continents except Antarctica. The information is stored in the International Tree Ring Data Bank, a library open to all researchers. As more tree data becomes available, a much richer picture forms of the nexus of past climate, ecosystems and human civilization.

For its first 80 years, the lab was located in much smaller - and noisier - quarters under the University of Arizona football stadium. "If you worked on Saturdays you could hear people in the bleachers stamping their feet," said Russell K. Monson, who studies plant physiology here.

In 2012, the lab moved into a larger building to accommodate its growing mission and number of researchers - now some 70 or so - and to unpack its vast collection of tree rings and core samples. There are now more than a half-million samples, from slivers to an enormous slice of giant sequoia in the lobby, a large enough table top, perhaps, to seat all of King Arthur's knights. The building houses the world's largest collection of tree ring samples.

The basement storage area resembles a coffee table wood shop, infused with the fragrant perfume of cut wood. Hundreds of two-inch-thick slices of large trees, their rich grains sanded and polished, are stacked on their sides.

The lab also houses a slice of the bristlecone pine that was cut down in the 1960s by a graduate student named Donald Rusk Currey from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It wasn't until after he felled the tree and counted the rings that he realized, to his horror, that he had, with permission from the United States Forest Service, unceremoniously sawed down the oldest known tree in the world - a stately gnarled pine called Prometheus.

Wood samples for research at the Laboratory of Tree Ring Research at the University of Arizona. Credit Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

Research involving tree rings is divided into three main categories - dendroclimatology, the analysis of tree rings for past climate data; dendroarchaeology, the study of tree rings to understand how past climate affected human societies; and dendroecology, which reconstructs past forest ecosystems. The most common tree rings studied come from bristlecone pine, fir and spruce.

At this particular time, the most essential role for tree rings is probably their use in reconstructing past climate and providing much greater context. "The instrumental period provides a snapshot," of past climate, said David Meko, a researcher here, "but the tree rings are a panorama."

This window into the deep climate past has become vital in a rapidly warming world, to show how the climate of the last half-century is far outside the historical norms going back thousands of years.

Living bristlecone pine trees, for example, are several thousand years old and their information is added to by those that died thousands of years ago, but remained intact in their cold, dry high-altitude environment.
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It's hard to argue with tree rings that huge environmental changes are not occurring. Climate change seen in the past six or seven decades has few, if any, comparisons in the far past, researchers say.

The current two-decade-long drought on the Colorado River, for instance, is the longest since medieval times when a drought lasted for 62 years - with no very wet years in between dry years. An occasional very wet year can make a long drought more bearable.

Moreover, conditions in some recent years are the hottest and driest in many centuries. "We keep breaking records year after year," Dr. Meko said. "It's a little worrisome to see the most extreme years right near the present."

Unprecedented hot droughts, like the current one, make a decline in precipitation even worse, by causing more evaporation. Officials along the Colorado River are deeply worried about the trend toward warmer temperatures and less precipitation and are preparing for a grim future without or with less river water - unthinkable just 20 years ago. (This year though, was an El Niño year, and the snowpack in the Colorado Rockies was well above average.)

To make matters worse, tree rings show that water in the Colorado River was apportioned to states based on flow from 1905 to 1922, some of the wettest years in the last 12 centuries, an era known as a pluvial period.

Researchers can also look at snowpack in tree ring records. In 2015, in the Sierras the snowpack was the lowest in 500 years. This year may be one of the highest snowpacks in decades, a testament perhaps to climate whiplash. Researchers here are reconstructing snowpack data by examining tree ring records across the entire western United States for the last 2,000 years.

Trees hold other valuable information as well. Oxygen isotope analysis, for example, has unlocked the source of the water that a tree took up centuries ago and can determine whether it was from a hurricane or a severe thunderstorm.

Tree rings also provide a glimpse into the possible global impacts of geoengineering - a proposal to scatter aluminum sulfate into the atmosphere to block the sun and cool the planet, which some scientists have proposed as a solution to climate change.

"Volcanic eruptions are the best proxy of geoengineering," Dr. Trouet said. Rings analyzed from trees in five locations around the world show that after a volcano erupted in 1568, the global climate cooled considerably for two years - evidenced in narrow tree rings - and the northern edge of the tropics receded as the planet cooled.

Samples from the Black Mesa Navajo archaeological site at the lab. Credit Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

Those tree rings also showed that during six decades, from 1568 until 1634, there was, because of natural climate variation, six decades of expansion of the subtropics, which pushed desert climates north. Because of expanding zones of hot and dry weather, the Ottoman Empire in Turkey ended, the Ming dynasty collapsed and the Jamestown colony in Virginia was abandoned, suggesting, Dr. Trouet said, they were in part at least, climate-related. "The way society handles a drought politically is also part of the picture," she said.

Other sources - lake sediments; ice core samples; coral; the otolith, or ear bone, of fish; and even the shells from living and long dead geoducks, a large bivalve with a snakelike appendage - add to the broader picture.

"We have divers sucking up ancient geoducks off the ocean floor," said Bryan Black, a professor of dendrochronology who also specializes in marine organisms. Combined with long dead geoduck shells, data could go back many thousands of years. Shells from the coast of Iceland already go back 1,000 years. "They show that the last century is unprecedentedly warm," Dr. Black said.

Experts are using the shell ring information, combined with tree ring data, to understand how climate drives ocean productivity and the species mix of fish, to assist fisheries managers. "The bottom line is to be aware of climate whiplash and what that means for fisheries," Dr. Black said.

Even the stars give up some of their secrets to trees. The sun and other stars emit radiation called Galactic Cosmic Rays, or G.C.R.s, that react in the atmosphere with nitrogen and change the levels of carbon 14, which is taken up by every living thing and becomes a tracer for cosmic ray levels.

Past spikes in G.C.R.s from solar flares or other sources are largely a mystery, but have attracted keen interest from researchers, because if they occur now they could wipe out communication satellites and other technology. An event in 744, first found in Japanese cedar trees and since found globally, is the strongest cosmic ray event in the tree ring record, a magnitude larger than the Carrington event, a solar storm in 1859, and apparently noted by people alive at the time.

"This year also appeared in the heavens a red crucifix, after sunset," was how the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles reported the event in the mid-eighth century.

It was most likely a huge solar flare. "It is unprecedented, there's nothing else like it," said Charlotte Pearson, a professor at the tree ring lab. "We're trying to work out what it is and what caused it but we're still not sure."

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Chronicles of the Rings: What Trees Tell Us

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Studying the historical data stored in centuries-old trees is a burgeoning field, with labs around the world learning more about historical patterns of weather and climate and the effects on humans. A tree sample from the Mediterranean at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona campus in Tucson.

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Opinion | To Help Prevent the Next Big Wildfire, Let the Forest Burn - The New York Times

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Opinion | To Help Prevent the Next Big Wildfire, Let the Forest Burn - The New York Times

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The photograph below shows the Yosemite Valley in 1899 on the left, with open meadows and a patchwork of large conifers.

On the right is the same view in 2011. The valley floor has many more trees.

Which forest do you think is healthier?

If you picked the sparser forest from 1899, you're on the right track.

Much of California's forestland is overgrown, partly because of federal regulations implemented in 1910, which mandated stamping out wildfires as soon as possible. These policies were revised around the 1970s to allow some fires to naturally burn their course, but much of the West has struggled to do so.

At the height of the most recent blazes, President Trump tweeted that there was "no reason" for the fires besides "gross mismanagement" by the state. Critics took issue with the timing and simplistic logic of the statement, but the comment drew attention to the way forest management affects the frequency and intensity of wildfires. Ecologists and forest experts attribute California's destructive wildfires to decades of aggressive fire suppression, in addition to the increased population of fire-prone areas and hotter, drier conditions due to climate change.

The solution needs to address all these things, but one critical step is shifting our understanding of fire's role in forest ecology. Policymakers and citizens alike must abandon the idea that trees are always worth saving and that fire is always a threat. Instead, they should permit modest, ecologically necessary wildfires to burn.

"For a long time, we were mistaken about what was going on in the forest," said Malcolm North, an ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service. "People believed that you needed to put fires out because it was burning the forest up. That has proven to be wrong."

California is now collecting itself at the tail end of its most destructive and deadliest wildfire season on record. But recovery is not just about donating to relief efforts and rebuilding burned homes. It's also about creating a new culture for forest and fire management in the state, one that respects the role that carefully planned fires play in preventing disasters.

In May, Gov. Jerry Brown took a step towards this future, dedicating $96 million to reducing wildfire risk in the state. He directed state offices to double the number of acres being managed with prescribed burns and vegetation thinning to 500,000 acres from 250,000 acres, among other directives like educating landowners about effective forest management.

"If California can begin to change, that will be a huge example for the rest of the country, certainly throughout the West," Dr. Pyne said.

Ash Ngu and Sahil Chinoy are graphics editors for The New York Times.

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Opinion | To Help Prevent the Next Big Wildfire, Let the Forest Burn

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The photograph below shows the Yosemite Valley in 1899 on the left, with open meadows and a patchwork of large conifers. On the right is the same view in 2011. The valley floor has many more trees. Which forest do you think is healthier?

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Glaciers Are Retreating. Millions Rely on Their Water. - The New York Times

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Glaciers Are Retreating. Millions Rely on Their Water. - The New York Times

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On a summer day in the mountains high above Almaty, Kazakhstan's largest city, the Tuyuksu glacier is melting like mad. Rivulets of water stream down the glacier's thin leading edge.

As she has for nearly two decades, Maria Shahgedanova, a glaciologist at the University of Reading in England, has come here to check on the Tuyuksu. As one of the longest-studied glaciers anywhere, the Tuyuksu helps gauge the impact of climate change on the world's ice.

With colleagues from the Kazakhstan Institute of Geography, Dr. Shahgedanova has made the slow trip from Almaty, 15 miles to the north and nearly two miles below, lumbering up a steep, rutted mountain road in a giant Russian utility vehicle.

Last year, at the end of the summer melting season, the team drew lines on the stakes marking the height of the ice, as researchers have done here for decades. Now, looking at a stake nearly a year later, Nikolay Kasatkin, one of the institute researchers, and Dr. Shahgedanova saw that more of the wood was visible. With the end of melting still a couple of months off, parts of the Tuyuksu were already about three feet thinner.

Glaciers represent the snows of centuries, compressed over time into slowly flowing rivers of ice, up to about a thousand feet thick here in the Tien Shan range and even thicker in other parts of the world. They are never static, accumulating snow in winter and losing ice to melting in summer. But in a warming climate melting outstrips accumulation, resulting in a net loss of ice.

The Tuyuksu, which is about a mile and a half long, is getting shorter as well as thinner. When the research station was built in 1957 it was just a few hundred yards from the Tuyuksu's leading edge, or tongue. Now, reaching the ice requires scrambling on foot for the better part of an hour over piles of boulders and till left as the glacier retreated.

What's happening in the mountains of southeastern Kazakhstan is occurring all over the globe.

The world's roughly 150,000 glaciers, not including the large ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, cover about 200,000 square miles of the earth's surface. Over the last four decades they've lost the equivalent of a layer of ice 70 feet thick.

Most of them are getting shorter, too. Some have shrunk to nothing: Smaller glaciers in places like the Rockies and the Andes have disappeared. Even if greenhouse gas emissions were sharply curtailed immediately, there has already been enough warming to continue shrinking glaciers around the world.

This great global melting contributes to sea level rise. It affects production of hydroelectricity. It leads to disasters like rapid, catastrophic floods and debris flows. It alters rivers and ecosystems, affecting the organisms that inhabit them.

But here in the Tien Shan, the biggest impact may be on the supply of water for people and agriculture.

The Little Almaty and several other glacier-fed rivers flow through and around the city. They supply some of the drinking water for the region's two million people and irrigation water for fields of corn and other crops outside the city.

Runoff from the mountains has not declined so far, Dr. Shahgedanova said. "We aren't seeing problems yet," she said, but some of her models suggest that is poised to change. "We're talking the next 20 years or so."

In addition to measuring ice loss on the Tuyuksu, Dr. Shahgedanova and her colleagues study the water in the Little Almaty and other rivers. It doesn't all come from melting glaciers; some comes from runoff of rain and melting snow, which some climate models predict may increase in the region. Other sources include thawing areas of frozen ground, or permafrost, and huge piles of rock fragments and ice that dominate the landscape below many glaciers.

Determining the mix of water sources is important for forecasting how the rivers will fare over time. A melting glacier can at first increase stream flow, but eventually the glacier reaches a tipping point, called peak flow, and meltwater begins to taper.

"At some point they cannot produce the water they are providing right now," said Matthias Huss, a researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. "It's really important for water managers to know when this tipping point is reached."

Across the Tibetan Plateau and in the Himalayan and Karakoram ranges, the glaciers number in the thousands and the people who rely on them in the hundreds of millions, along rivers like the Indus in Pakistan, the Ganges and Brahmaputra in India, the Yellow and Yangtze in China and the Mekong in Southeast Asia.

Eventually these rivers will be affected by glacial retreat, said Arthur Lutz, a hydrologist with FutureWater, a Dutch water-resources consulting firm. The timing may vary; the Indus, for example, is more dependent on glacial melt than the Ganges, which receives much of its water from the monsoon.

Either way, Dr. Lutz said, "the total sum of water you get from the mountains is likely to increase until about the 2050s."

Much of the water from the Tuyuksu and other glaciers eventually reaches the lowlands north of Almaty where it irrigates crops.

When flows in these rivers begin to decline, the region's farmers could face a crisis.

Most of the irrigation works in the region date from the Soviet era. They are old, run-down and inefficient.

There is not much incentive, or money, to install improvements like drip irrigation that would save water and improve productivity.

But more efficient water management is what Kazakhstan needs to prepare for the days when the flow from glacier-fed rivers starts to drop off.

Aleksi Gorbatuk is a farmer with 370 acres of corn in Karaoy, about 25 miles north of Almaty, and more acreage elsewhere. He'd like to install drip irrigation on some of his fields. He knows it would help conserve water, and the government tells him that is important in an era of climate change. It would also save him money in the long run by making his fields more productive. But it is expensive.

"The government explains that in the near future there will be a shortage of water," Mr. Gorbatuk said. "So every farmer needs to think about his money, so if tomorrow we don't have this water, what will we do."

Mr. Gorbatuk's situation is a reminder that, as Dr. Huss put it, "declining waters from glaciers or mountains in general do not necessarily need to be a problem."

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Glaciers Are Retreating. Millions Rely on Their Water.

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On a summer day in the mountains high above Almaty, Kazakhstan's largest city, the Tuyuksu glacier is melting like mad. Rivulets of water stream down the glacier's thin leading edge. As she has for nearly two decades, Maria Shahgedanova, a glaciologist at the University of Reading in England, has come here to check on the Tuyuksu.

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The many ways climate change worsens California wildfires » Yale Climate Connections

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The many ways climate change worsens California wildfires » Yale Climate Connections

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California has been ravaged by record wildfires in recent years. 2017 was the state's costliest and most destructive fire season on record. The Mendocino wildfire in July 2018 was California's largest-ever by a whopping 60 percent.

Even though California's wildfire season has traditionally ended in October, the Camp Fire raging in November 2018 is the state's most destructive on record.

The data tell the story: Six of California's ten most destructive wildfires on record have now struck in just the past three years.

President Trump's tweets suggesting forest mismanagement is to blame for California's wildfire woes, and threatening to withhold federal funding, have prompted widespread rebukes for their insensitivity as thousands of citizens flee the fires - some, tragically, unsuccessfully - and as an affront to thousands of weary firefighters.

The reality is that about 57 percent of the state's forests are owned and managed by the federal government, and another 40 percent by families, companies, and Native American tribes. Forest management does play some role in creating wildfire fuel, but some wildfires aren't even located in forests. Moreover, scientific evidence clearly shows that climate change is exacerbating California's wildfires in different ways:

Higher temperatures dry out vegetation and soil, creating more wildfire fuel.

Climate change is shortening the California rainy season, thus extending the fire season.

Climate change is also shifting the Santa Ana winds that fan particularly dangerous wildfires in Southern California.

The warming atmosphere is slowing the jet stream, leading to more California heat waves and high-pressure ridges in the Pacific. Those ridges deflect from the state some storms that would otherwise bring much-needed moisture to slow the spread of fires.

The Golden State's hotter, drier conditions

Global warming causes higher temperatures, and 2014 through 2018 have been California's five hottest years on record. This pattern leads to an increase in evapotranspiration - the combination of evaporation and transpiration transferring more moisture from land and water surfaces and plants to the atmosphere. Essentially, global warming causes plants and soil to dry out as the atmosphere holds more water vapor.

These are the many ways in which climate change is clearly connected to California #wildfires. Click To Tweet

On top of this direct drying effect, climate change is causing a shift in rain patterns. Northern California has received only one inch of rain this season, which is about one-fifth of normal. A 2018 paper published in Nature Climate Change, led by UCLA's Daniel Swain, found that as a result of global warming, California's rainy season will become increasingly concentrated in the winter months between December and February. April, May, September, October, and November will become increasingly dry, meaning that the state's wildfire season will start earlier and end later. As Swain noted in an informative Twitter thread about California's November 2018 wildfires,

If Northern California had received anywhere near the typical amount of autumn precipitation this year (around 4-5 in. of rain near #CampFire point of origin), explosive fire behavior & stunning tragedy in #Paradise would almost certainly not have occurred.

With these hotter, drier conditions extending late into the year, wildfires have become larger, and they spread faster, cause more damage, and are more difficult to contain.

In Southern California, Santa Ana winds coming later in year

In a 2006 paper published in Geophysical Research letters, Berkeley scientists Norman Miller and Nicole Schlegel predicted that global warming would push the Southern California fire season associated with Santa Ana winds into the winter months. Those Santa Ana fires are especially costly because of the speed at which they spread due to the winds and because of their proximity to urban areas. The November 2018 Woolsey fire around Malibu and Thousand Oaks, California, is a tragic example.

Researchers of a 2015 study published in Environmental Research Letters, led by Yufang Jin at UC Davis, forecast that the area burned by Southern California wildfires will increase by about 70 percent by mid-century as a result of the drier, hotter, windier conditions caused by global warming. And these Southern California wildfires often occur outside of forests, according to the president of the Pasadena Fire Association.

Connections to the Arctic and jet stream

Rutgers climate scientist Jennifer Francis over the past decade has been researching the connection between changes in the Arctic and extreme weather patterns throughout the Northern Hemisphere. In recent years a growing number of climate scientists have found evidence supporting her groundbreaking research.

The Northern Hemisphere jet stream is a result of the temperature difference between the cold Arctic and warmer lower latitudes in regions like North America and Europe. But the Arctic is the fastest-warming region on Earth, largely because as reflective sea ice disappears, the Arctic surface is increasingly covered by dark oceans that absorb more sunlight. The rapidly-warming Arctic is shrinking the temperature difference between that region and the lower latitudes, which in turn weakens the jet stream. As a result, rather than a fast-moving flow of air, the jet stream increasingly is taking a slow, meandering path across the Northern Hemisphere.

In between these jet stream waves, weather patterns have a tendency to stall in place. These patterns include heat waves, the polar vortex, hurricanes and associated record rainfall, and high-pressure ridges, and the latter has tended to occur off the California coast. During the drought of 2012 to 2016 - California's worst in over a millennium - a high-pressure ridge in the Pacific was so persistent, that Swain coined it the " Ridiculously Resilient Ridge." A similar system has formed off the coast in late 2018:

These high-pressure ridges divert storm systems around California, leading to the lack of rainfall in the state during these dry spells. In a 2017 paper in Nature Communications, researchers led by Ivana Cvijanovic and Ben Santer found still more evidence of a connection between disappearing Arctic sea ice and these high-pressure ridges in the Pacific. And in an October 2018 paper in Science Advances, scientists Michael Mann and Stefan Rahmstorf and colleagues found that depending on how human fossil fuel pollution changes in the coming years, the frequency of wavy jet stream events could triple by the end of the century.

Clear evidence of wildfire-climate connection

Climate scientists have identified numerous ways in which human-caused global warming is exacerbating California wildfires. A 2015 special report in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society found that "An increase in fire risk in California is attributable to human-induced climate change." And a 2016 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that human-caused global warming doubled the area burned by wildfires in the western U.S. over just the past 30 years.

That's an inconvenient conclusion for those who want to maintain a "business as usual" approach to the use of fossil fuels. And also to those favoring the President's suggestion that California's wildfire troubles can largely be solved just by adjusting forest management, or his recent 60 Minutes TV view that " it'll change back again."

The reality is that the more global warming humanity causes, the worse California's wildfires will become.

Editor's note: We welcome this article as the first of a monthly series of reports by new Yale Climate Connections regular contributor Dana Nuccitelli.

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The many ways climate change worsens California wildfires " Yale Climate Connections

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California has been ravaged by record wildfires in recent years. 2017 was the state's costliest and most destructive fire season on record. The Mendocino wildfire in July 2018 was California's largest-ever by a whopping 60 percent. Even though California's wildfire season has traditionally ended in October, the Camp Fire raging in November 2018 is the state's most destructive on record.

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Climate change: Where we are in seven charts and what you can do to help - BBC News

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Climate change: Where we are in seven charts and what you can do to help - BBC News

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Representatives from nearly 200 countries are gathering in Poland for talks on climate change - aimed at breathing new life into the Paris Agreement.
The UN has warned the 2015 Paris accord's goal of limiting global warming to "well below 2C above pre-industrial levels" is in danger because major economies, including the US and the EU, are falling short of their pledges.

But scientists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - the leading international body on global warming - last month argued the 2C Paris pledge didn't go far enough. The global average temperature rise actually needed to be kept below 1.5C, they said.

So how warm has the world got and what can we do about it?

1. The world has been getting hotter

The world is now nearly one degree warmer than it was before widespread industrialisation, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

The global average temperature for the first 10 months of 2018 was 0.98C above the levels of 1850-1900, according to five independently maintained global data sets.

(If you can't see this chart tap or click here)

The 20 warmest years on record have been in the past 22 years, with 2015-2018 making up the top four, the WMO says.

If this trend continues, temperatures may rise by 3-5C by 2100.

One degree may not sound like much, but, according to the IPCC, if countries fail to act, the world will face catastrophic change - sea levels will rise, ocean temperatures and acidity will increase and our ability to grow crops, such as rice, maize and wheat, would be in danger.

What is in the Paris climate agreement?

Final call to stop 'climate catastrophe'

Urgency the key at major climate summit

2. The year 2018 set all sorts of records

This year saw record high temperatures in many places across the world amid an unusually prolonged period of hot weather.

Large parts of the northern hemisphere saw a succession of heatwaves take hold in Europe, Asia, North America and northern Africa - a result of strong high pressure systems that created a "heat dome".

Over the period shown on the map below (May to July 2018), the yellow dots show where a heat record was broken on a given date, pink indicates places that were the hottest they had ever been in the month shown, and dark red represents a place that was the hottest since records began.

The concern is that such hot and cold weather fronts are being blocked - stuck over regions for long periods - more frequently because of climate change, leading to more extreme weather events.

3. We are not on track to meet climate change targets

If we add up all the promises to cut emissions made by countries that have signed the Paris climate agreement, the world would still warm by more than 3C by the end of this century.

Over the past three years, climate scientists have shifted the definition of what they believe is the "safe" limit of climate change.

For decades, researchers argued the global temperature rise must be kept below 2C by the end of this century to avoid the worst impacts.

Countries signing up to the Paris agreement pledged to keep temperatures "well below 2C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5C".

But scientists now agree that we actually need to keep temperature rises to below 1.5C.

4. The biggest emitters are China and the US

The countries emitting the most greenhouse gases by quite a long way are China and the US. Together they account for more than 40% of the global total, according to 2017 data from the European Commission's Joint Research Centre and PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency.

The US's environmental policy has shifted under the Trump administration, which has pursued a pro-fossil fuels agenda.

After taking office, President Donald Trump announced the US would withdraw from the Paris climate change agreement.

At the time, Mr Trump said he wanted to negotiate a new "fair" deal that would not disadvantage US businesses and workers.

5. Urban areas are particularly under threat

Almost all (95%) of cities facing extreme climate risks are in Africa or Asia, a report by risk analysts Verisk Maplecroft has found.

And it's the faster-growing cities that are most at risk, including megacities like Lagos in Nigeria and Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Some 84 of the world's 100 fastest-growing cities face "extreme" risks from rising temperatures and extreme weather brought on by climate change.

6. Arctic sea ice is also in danger

The extent of Arctic sea ice has dropped in recent years. It reached its lowest point on record in 2012.

Sea ice has been reducing for decades, with melting accelerating since the early 2000s, according to the UK Parliament's Environmental Audit Committee.

The Arctic Ocean may be ice free in the summer as soon as the 2050s, unless emissions are reduced, the committee has said.

The WMO found the extent of Arctic sea ice in 2018 was much lower than normal, with the maximum in March the third lowest on record and the September minimum the sixth lowest.

7. We can all do more to help

While governments need to make big changes - individuals can play a role too.

Scientists say we all have to make "rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes" to our lifestyles, in order to avoid severely damaging climate change.

The IPCC says we need to: buy less meat, milk, cheese and butter; eat more locally sourced seasonal food - and throw less of it away; drive electric cars but walk or cycle short distances; take trains and buses instead of planes; use videoconferencing instead of business travel; use a washing line instead of a tumble dryer; insulate homes; demand low carbon in every consumer product.

The single biggest way to reduce your environmental impact on the planet is to modify your diet to include less meat - according to recent studies.

Scientists say we ought to eat less meat because of the carbon emissions the meat industry produces, as well as other negative environmental impacts.

A recent study published in the journal Science highlighted a massive variation in the environmental impact of producing the same food.

For example, beef cattle raised on deforested land produces 12 times more greenhouse gas emissions than those reared on natural pastures.

Crucially, the analysis shows that meat with the lowest environmental impact still creates more greenhouse gas emissions than growing vegetables and cereal crops in the least environmentally-friendly way.

But as well as altering our diets, research suggests that farming practices need to change significantly to benefit the environment.
By Nassos Stylianou, Clara Guibourg, Daniel Dunford and Lucy Rodgers

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Climate change: Where we are in seven charts

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Representatives from nearly 200 countries are gathering in Poland for talks on climate change - aimed at breathing new life into the Paris Agreement. The UN has warned the 2015 Paris accord's goal of limiting global warming to "well below 2C above pre-industrial levels" is in danger because major economies, including the US and the EU, are falling short of their pledges.

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Like a Terror Movie

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A seaside neighborhood in Mexico Beach, Fla., devastated by Hurricane Michael this year. Credit Credit Scott Olson/Getty Images

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Global warming is posing such wide-ranging risks to humanity, involving so many types of phenomena, that by the end of this century some parts of the world could face as many as six climate-related crises at the same time, researchers say.

This chilling prospect is described in a paper published Monday in Nature Climate Change, a respected academic journal, that shows the effects of climate change across a broad spectrum of problems, including heat waves, wildfires, sea level rise, hurricanes, flooding, drought and shortages of clean water.

Such problems are already coming in combination, said the lead author, Camilo Mora of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He noted that Florida had recently experienced extreme drought, record high temperatures and wildfires - and also Hurricane Michael, the powerful Category 4 storm that slammed into the Panhandle this summer. Similarly, California is suffering through the worst wildfires the state has ever seen, as well as drought, extreme heat waves and degraded air quality that threatens the health of residents.

Things will get worse, the authors wrote. The paper projects future trends and suggests that, by 2100, unless humanity takes forceful action to curb the greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change, some tropical coastal areas of the planet, like the Atlantic coast of South and Central America, could be hit by as many as six crises at a time.

That prospect is "like a terror movie that is real," Dr. Mora said.

The authors include a list of caveats about the research: Since it is a review of papers, it will reflect some of the potential biases of science in this area, which include the possibility that scientists might focus on negative effects more than positive ones; there is also a margin of uncertainty involved in discerning the imprint of climate change from natural variability.

New York can expect to be hit by four climate crises at a time by 2100 if carbon emissions continue at their current pace, the study says, but if emissions are cut significantly that number could be reduced to one. The troubled regions of the coastal tropics could see their number of concurrent hazards reduced from six to three.

The paper explores the ways that climate change intensifies hazards and describes the interconnected nature of such crises. Greenhouse gas emissions, by warming the atmosphere, can enhance drought in places that are normally dry, "ripening conditions for wildfires and heat waves," the researchers say. In wetter areas, a warmer atmosphere retains more moisture and strengthens downpours, while higher sea levels increase storm surge and warmer ocean waters can contribute to the overall destructiveness of storms.

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A search-and-rescue team looking for human remains in the aftermath of the recent Camp Fire in Paradise, Calif. The state is also suffering from drought, extreme heat waves and degraded air quality. Credit Eric Thayer for The New York Times

In a scientific world marked by specialization and siloed research, this multidisciplinary effort by 23 authors reviewed more than 3,000 papers on various effects of climate change. The authors determined 467 ways in which those changes in climate affect human physical and mental health, food security, water availability, infrastructure and other facets of life on Earth.

The paper concludes that traditional research into one element of climate change and its effects can miss the bigger picture of interrelation and risk.

Climate change also has different ramifications for the world's haves and have-nots, the authors found: "The largest losses of human life during extreme climatic events occurred in developing nations, whereas developed nations commonly face a high economic burden of damages and requirements for adaptation."

People are not generally attuned to dealing with problems like climate change, Dr. Mora said. "We as humans don't feel the pain of people who are far away or far into the future," he said. "We normally care about people who are close to us or that are impacting us, or things that will happen tomorrow."

And so, he said, people tend to look at events far in the future and tell themselves, "We can deal with these things later, we have more pressing problems now." But, he added, this research "documented how bad this already is."

The paper includes an interactive map of the various hazards under different emissions scenarios for any location in the world, produced by Esri, which develops geographic information systems. "We see that climate change is literally redrawing the lines on the map, and revealing the threats that our world faces at every level," said Dawn Wright, the company's chief scientist.

Michael E. Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University who was not involved in the paper, said it underscored the urgency for action to curb the effects of climate change and showed that "the costs of inaction greatly outweigh the costs of taking action."

Dr. Mann published a recent paper suggesting that climate change effects on the jet stream are contributing to a range of extreme summer weather events, such as heat waves in North America, Europe and Asia, wildfires in California and flooding in Japan. The new study, he said, dovetails with that research, and "is, if anything, overly conservative" - that is, it may underestimate the threats and costs associated with human-caused climate change.

A co-author of the new paper, Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, hailed its interdisciplinary approach. "There's more than one kind of risk out there," he said, but scientists tend to focus on their area of research. "Nations, societies in general, have to deal with multiple hazards, and it's important to put the whole picture together."

Like military leaders developing the capability to fight wars on more than one front, governments have to be ready to face more than one climate crisis at a time, Dr. Emanuel said.

Dr. Mora said he had considered writing a book or a movie that would reflect the frightening results of the research. His working title, which describes how dire the situation is for humanity, is unprintable here. His alternate title, he said, is "We Told You So."

For more news on climate and the environment, follow @NYTClimate on Twitter.

John Schwartz is part of the climate team. Since joining The Times in 2000, he has covered science, law, technology, the space program and more, and has written for almost every section. @jswatz * Facebook

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'Like a Terror Movie': How Climate Change Will Cause More Simultaneous Disasters

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Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd: , our email newsletter. Global warming is posing such wide-ranging risks to humanity, involving so many types of phenomena, that by the end of this century some parts of the world could face as many as six climate-related crises at the same time, researchers say.

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The Hurricanes, and Climate-Change Questions, Keep Coming. Yes, They’re Linked. - The New York Times

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The Hurricanes, and Climate-Change Questions, Keep Coming. Yes, They’re Linked. - The New York Times

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A storm chaser returned to collect his things after debris collapsed on his car Wednesday in Panama City, Fla. Credit Credit Gerald Herbert/Associated Press

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Scientists are increasingly confident of the links between global warming and hurricanes.

In a warming world, they say, hurricanes will be stronger, for a simple reason: Warmer water provides more energy that feeds them.

Hurricanes and other extreme storms will also be wetter, for a simple reason: Warmer air holds more moisture.

And, storm surges from hurricanes will be worse, for a simple reason that has nothing to do with the storms themselves: Sea levels are rising.

Researchers cannot say, however, that global warming is to blame for the specifics of the latest storm, Hurricane Michael, which grew to Category 4 with sustained winds of 155 miles an hour, as it hit the Florida Panhandle on Wednesday. Such attribution may come later, when scientists compare the real-world storm to a fantasy-world computer simulation in which humans did not pump billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

There are already tantalizing suggestions, however, that the warming caused by all those greenhouse-gas emissions has had an impact on Michael. A 2013 study showed that sea-surface temperatures in the eastern Gulf of Mexico have warmed over the past century by more than what would be expected from natural variability. These are the waters that the hurricane churned across as it headed toward the Panhandle and its maximum wind speeds more than doubled.

"That general region has been one where there has been long-term climate warming," said Thomas R. Knutson, a climate scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and lead author of the study. "We have reason to believe humans have made the water warmer."

Read more about STORMS And climate change

While there is debate over whether global warming will lead to more frequent hurricanes - many models suggest there may actually be fewer in the future, although with a greater proportion of major ones - scientists are generally agreed about the effects of warming on intensity, as measured by wind speeds.

"We have a very clear theory on how tropical cyclones intensify," said Suzana J. Camargo, an ocean and climate physicist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y.

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Panama City, Fla., on Wednesday. The storm has sustained winds of 155 miles an hour. Credit Joe Raedle/Getty Images

The theory, largely the work of Kerry Emanuel, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, holds that the temperature difference between ocean and upper atmosphere determines how much a storm intensifies. A bigger temperature difference leads to the release of more energy into the storm.

"The warmer you have the ocean, the bigger the difference," Dr. Camargo said.

The theory has been reinforced by computer simulations that produce more intense storms with rising ocean temperatures. "We understand the theory behind it, and we have seen it in the models," Dr. Camargo said.

As for storms producing more precipitation, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has concluded that human-caused warming has affected the amount of water vapor in the air, and that extreme precipitation events have already increased in many parts of the world. The group's latest report, issued this week, found that such extreme precipitation will likely further increase if the world cannot limit overall warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

Dr. Knutson cautioned that while this increase in rain and snow amounts has been seen in extreme events in general, of which hurricanes are a subset, "we haven't actually seen this in the data for hurricanes yet." But if a given amount of air flowing into a hurricane carries more water vapor, he said, "that enhances the water supply to the storm so it can create higher rain rates."

As Hurricane Michael approached land on Wednesday, forecasters warned that the worst damage could come from a storm surge of as much as 13 feet. Florida, both along the Gulf and the Atlantic Ocean, is exceptionally vulnerable to storm surge, with strings of low-lying communities on the coasts and along waterways that are connected to the sea.

Storm surge occurs when winds pile water up as it approaches land, and many factors - including the contours of the seafloor, topography of bays and inlets and the stage of the tide when the surge hits - can affect it. But rising sea levels can have an impact, too.

"What's not emphasized enough is the sea level-rise connection," Dr. Camargo said. "Even if there weren't changes in the hurricane itself, just because you have sea-level rise you end up having more flooding."

Seas are rising for two main reasons: water expands slightly as it warms, and glaciers and ice sheets add more water as they melt. But the rise can vary because of local factors like uplift or subsidence of the land.

In the past four decades, global average sea levels have risen by about four inches. That may not seem like much, and in a 15-foot storm surge it may not add much to the destruction.

"But we're not talking about a few inches anymore by the end of the century," Dr. Camargo said. "We're talking about a foot or so. Then, it makes a difference."

For more news on climate and the environment, follow @NYTClimate on Twitter.

Henry Fountain covers climate change, with a focus on the innovations that will be needed to overcome it. He is the author of "The Great Quake," a book about the 1964 Alaskan earthquake. @henryfountain * Facebook

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: A Triple Threat From Climate Change: More Rain in Larger Storms on Rising Seas. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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The Hurricanes, and Climate-Change Questions, Keep Coming. Yes, They're Linked.

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Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd: , our email newsletter. Scientists are increasingly confident of the links between global warming and hurricanes. In a warming world, they say, hurricanes will be stronger, for a simple reason: Warmer water provides more energy that feeds them.

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Did Climate Change Happen Once Before In Earth's History? - The Atlantic

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Did Climate Change Happen Once Before In Earth's History? - The Atlantic

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During the rise of mammals, Earth's temperatures spiked in a scary way that the planet may experience again soon.

Mike Hutchings / Reuters

They were strange days at the beginning of the age of mammals. The planet was still hungover from the astonishing disappearance of its marquee superstars, the dinosaurs. Earth's newest crater was still a smoldering system of hydrothermal vents, roiling under the Gulf of Mexico. In the wake of Armageddon our shell-shocked ancestors meekly negotiated new roles on a planet they inherited quite by accident. Before long, life settled into new rhythms: Earth hosted 50-foot-long boas sliding through steam-bath jungles, birds grew gigantic in imitation of their dearly departed cousins, and mildly modern mammals we might squint to recognize appeared. Within a few million years, loosed from under the iron heel of the vanished giants, they began to experiment. Early whales pranced across a Pakistani archipelago on all fours, testing out life in the water. The first lemur-like primates leapt from the treetops, and hoofed things of all varieties dashed through the forest.

But the most striking feature of this early age of mammals is that it was almost unbelievably hot, so hot that around 50 million years ago there were crocodiles, palm trees, and sand tiger sharks in the Arctic Circle. On the other side of the blue-green orb, in waters that today would surround Antarctica, sea-surface temperatures might have topped an unthinkable 86degreesFahrenheit, with near-tropical forests on Antarctica itself. There were perhaps even sprawling, febrile dead zones spanning the tropics, too hot even for animal or plant life of any sort.

This is what you get in an ancient atmosphere with around 1,000 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide. If this number sounds familiar, 1,000 ppm of CO ₂ is around what humanity is on pace to reach by the end of this century. That should be mildly concerning.

"You put more CO ₂ in the atmosphere and you get more warming, that's just super-simple physics that we figured out in the 19th century," says David Naafs, an organic geochemist at the University of Bristol. "But exactly how much it will warm by the end of the century, we don't know. Based on our research of these ancient climates, though, it's probably more than we thought."

Last week, Naafs and colleagues released a study in Nature Geoscience that reconstructs temperatures on land during this ancient high-CO ₂ hothouse of the late Paleocene and early Eocene epochs-the sweltering launch to the age of mammals. And the temperatures they unearthed are unsurprisingly scorching.

To study Earth's past, scientists need good rocks to study, and fortunately for geologists and fossil-fuel companies alike, the jungles and swamps of this early age of mammals left behind lots of coal. The Powder River Basin in the United States, for instance, is filled with fossil Paleocene swamplands that, when burned today, contribute about 10 percent of U.S. carbon emissions. Naafs' team studied examples of lower-quality coals called lignites, or fossilized peat. They had been collected around the world (everywhere from open-pit coal mines in Germany to outcrops in New Zealand), and spanned the late-Paleocene and early-Eocene epochs, from around 56 to 48 million years ago. They were able to reverse engineer the ancient climate by analyzing temperature-sensitive structures of lipids produced by fossil bacteria and archaea living in these bygone wetlands, and preserved for all time in the coal. The team found that, under this past regime of high CO ₂, in the ancient U.K., Germany, and New Zealand, life endured mean annual temperatures of 23 - 29 degrees Celsius (73-84 degrees Fahrenheit) or 10-15 degrees Celsius (18-27 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than modern times.

"These wetlands looked exactly how only tropical wetlands look at present, like the Everglades or the Amazon," Naafs says. "So Europe would look like the Everglades and a heat wave like we're currently experiencing in Europe would be completely normal. That is, it would be the everyday climate."

That modern European heat wave has, in recent weeks, sent sunbathing Scandinavians and reindeer to the beach in temperatures topping 90 degrees Fahrenheit in the Arctic Circle. It has also ignited devastating wildfires across Greece and triggered an excruciating weekend for Spain and Portugal. But over 50 million years ago this would have been the baseline from about 45 to 60 degrees latitude. Under this broiling regime, with unprecedented heat as the norm, actual heat waves might have begun to take on an unearthly quality.

"Perhaps a heat wave in Europe would be something like 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) for three weeks. We don't know." So that was life in the late Paleocene and early Eocene in the high mid-latitudes. But closer to the equator in this global sweat lodge, the heat might have been even more outrageous, shattering the limits of complex life. To see exactly how hot, Naafs' team also analyzed ancient lignite samples from India, which would have been in the tropics at the time-that subcontinent still drifting across the Indian Ocean toward its eventual mountain-raising rendezvous with Asia. But unfortunately, the temperatures from these samples were maxed out. That is, they were too hot for his team to measure by the new methods they had developed. So it remains an open question just how infernal the tropics became in these early days of our ancestors, but some computers tasked with recreating this planet spit out the stuff of science fiction.

"Some climate models suggest that the tropics just became a dead zone with temperatures over 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) like in Africa and South America," says Naafs. "But we have no data so we don't know."

Naafs' work fits into a larger developing picture of Earth as an almost unrecognizable greenhouse planet of the distant past. University of Colorado paleontologist Jaelyn Eberle recently returned to her office in Boulder from Ellesmere Island, in the Canadian High Arctic, where she's been doing research since the 1990s. Ellesmere is as far north as you can get before you fall off North America and run into Père Noël drifting over pack ice. Here, featureless highlands overlook ice-choked fjords and a lone Peary's caribou might mingle with a dozen musk oxen under a vast Nunavut sky. There are also polar bears, but Eberle luckily hasn't had any run-ins so far-though perspective can play tricks on you at the top of the world, and a snow-white artic hare on its hind legs at the appropriate distance can appear threatening enough.

"You pick up your gun and get all nervous and worried and then look through your binoculars ... It's just a rabbit," says Eberle.

But Eberle isn't venturing this far north just for the occasional hair-raising encounter with polar wildlife. Her target is warmer-weather fauna. Though there are no trees here at the top of the world, there are tree stumps. And they are around 50 million years old.

"The fossil forests on Ellesmere are spectacular," Eberle says about the ecosystem entombed in the arctic soils. "You start really looking into them and you go, 'Wow. We are dealing with a rainforest.'"

Eberle is a vertebrate paleontologist and though there's the aforementioned odd musk ox passing by her camp to consider, in the rocks below she has her pick of animals to study.

"You've got alligators, giant tortoises, primates, things like that. We have these big hippo-like animals called Coryphodon. You have tapirs-so you've got tapirs living pretty close to the North Pole in the early Eocene, which today-clearly tapirs are not at the North Pole," she says, laughing.

The presence of these animals suggests a very warm world indeed. And yet, there is a seeming disconnect, between traditional projections for future warming-like those made by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which predicts around 4 degrees Celsius (7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by the end of the century under a business-as-usual emissions scenario (still frightening) and sea-level rise measured in mere inches (still frightening)-and the scarcely recognizable Earths buried in the rocks and created under similar CO ₂ regimes, like those that Eberle unearths.

One obvious way to reconcile this disparity is by noticing that the changes to the ancient earth took place over hundreds-of-thousands to millions of years and (IPCC graphs notwithstanding) that time won't stop at the end of the 21st century. The changes that we've already set in motion, unless we act rapidly to countervail them, will similarly take millennia to fully unfold. The last time CO ₂ was at 400 ppm (as it is today) was 3 million years ago during the Pliocene epoch, when sea levels were perhaps 80 feet higher than today. Clearly the climate is not yet at equilibrium for a 400-ppm world.

And it won't be for quite some time. And anyway, we're clearly not content to stop at just 400 ppm. If we do, in fact, push CO ₂ up to around 1,000 ppm by the end of the century, the warming will persist and the earth will continue to change for what, to humans, is a practical eternity. And when the earth system finally does arrive at its equilibrium, it will most likely be in a climate state with no analog in the short evolutionary history of Homo sapiens. Most worryingly, the climate models that we depend on as a species to predict our future have largely failed to predict our sultry ancient past. And though the gulf is narrowing, and models are catching up, even those that come close to reproducing the hothouse of the early Eocene require injecting 16 times the modern level of CO ₂ into the air to achieve it-far beyond the rather meager doubling or tripling of CO ₂ indicated by the rock record.

Clearly we are missing something, and Naafs thinks that one of the missing ingredients in the models is methane, a powerful greenhouse gas which might help close the divide between model worlds and fossil worlds.

"We know nothing about the methane cycle during these greenhouse periods," he says. "We know the hotter it gets the more methane comes out of these wetlands, but we know nothing about the methane cycle beyond the reach of ice cores which only goes back 800,000 years ... We know tropical wetlands pump much more methane into the atmosphere compared to [cooler] wetlands. And we know methane can actually amplify high-latitude warming, so maybe that's some of the missing feedback."

In many ways these ancient worlds are not analogs to our own. We have to be careful when making comparisons between the two. The early age of mammals was a different world. The continents were in slightly different positions, leading to a vastly different ocean circulation and boundary conditions quite unlike our own world, 50 million years on-with all the tectonic, oceanographic, and biological changes that come with such a yawning expanse of time. But artificially jam enough greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and Naafs thinks that many of the wildest features of the early age of mammals could be recreated.

"If we were to burn all the fossil fuels and wait a few centuries we might return to this," he says. "Basically every type of paleoclimate research that's being done shows that high CO ₂ means that it's very warm. And when it gets very warm, it can be really, really, really warm."

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Peter Brannen is a science writer based in Boston. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Wired. He is the author of The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions.

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Scientists Have Uncovered a Frightening Climate Change Precedent

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During the rise of mammals, Earth's temperatures spiked in a scary way that the planet may experience again soon. They were strange days at the beginning of the age of mammals. The planet was still hungover from the astonishing disappearance of its marquee superstars, the dinosaurs.

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Climate scientists are struggling to find the right words for very bad news - The Washington Post

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Climate scientists are struggling to find the right words for very bad news - The Washington Post

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October 3
In Incheon, South Korea, this week, representatives of over 130 countries and about 50 scientists have packed into a large conference center going over every line of an all-important report: What chance does the planet have of keeping climate change to a moderate, controllable level?

When they can't agree, they form "contact groups" outside the hall, trying to strike an agreement and move the process along. They are trying to reach consensus on what it would mean - and what it would take - to limit the warming of the planet to just 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, when 1 degree Celsius has already occurred and greenhouse gas emissions remain at record highs.

"It's the biggest peer-review exercise there is," said Jonathan Lynn, head of communications for the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "It involves hundreds or even thousands of people looking at it."

The IPCC, the world's definitive scientific body when it comes to climate change, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize a decade ago and has been given what may rank as its hardest task yet.

It must not only tell governments what we know about climate change - but how close they have brought us to the edge. And by implication, how much those governments are failing to live up to their goals for the planet, set in the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

1.5 degrees is the most stringent and ambitious goal in that agreement, originally put there at the behest of small island nations and other highly vulnerable countries. But it is increasingly being regarded by all as a key guardrail, as severe climate change effects have been felt in just the past five years - raising concerns about what a little bit more warming would bring.

"Half a degree doesn't sound like much til you put it in the right context," said Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development. "It's 50 percent more than we have now."

The idea of letting warming approach 2 degrees Celsius increasingly seems disastrous in this context.

Parts of the planet, like the Arctic, have already warmed beyond 1.5 degrees and are seeing alarming changes. Antarctica and Greenland, containing many feet of sea-level rise, are wobbling. Major die-offs have hit coral reefs around the globe, suggesting an irreplaceable planetary feature could soon be lost.

It is universally recognized that the pledges made in Paris would lead to a warming far beyond 1.5 degrees - more like 2.5 or 3 degrees Celsius, or even more. And that was before the United States, the world's second-largest emitter, decided to try to back out.

"The pledges countries made during the Paris climate accord don't get us anywhere close to what we have to do," said Drew Shindell, a climate expert at Duke University and one of the authors of the IPCC report. "They haven't really followed through with actions to reduce their emissions in any way commensurate with what they profess to be aiming for."

The new 1.5 C report will feed into a process called the "Talanoa Dialogue," in which parties to the Paris agreement begin to consider the large gap between what they say they want to achieve and what they are actually doing. The dialogue will unfold in December at an annual United Nations climate meeting in Katowice, Poland.

But it is unclear what concrete commitments may result.

At issue is what scientists call the 'carbon budget': Because carbon dioxide lives in the atmosphere for so long, there's only a limited amount that can be emitted before it becomes impossible to avoid a given temperature, like 1.5 degrees Celsius. And since the world emits about 41 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year, if the remaining budget is 410 billion tons (for example), then scientists can say we have 10 years until the budget is gone and 1.5 C is locked in.

Unless emissions start to decline - which gives more time. This is why scenarios for holding warming to 1.5 degrees C require rapid and deep changes to how we get energy.

The window may now be as narrow as around 15 years of current emissions, but since we don't know for sure, according to the researchers, that really depends on how much of a margin of error we're willing to give ourselves.

And if we can't cut other gases - such as methane - or if the Arctic permafrost starts emitting large volumes of additional gases, then the budget gets even narrower.

"It would be an enormous challenge to keep warming below a threshold" of 1.5 degrees Celsius, said Shindell, bluntly. "This would be a really enormous lift."

So enormous, he said, that it would require a monumental shift toward decarbonization. By 2030 - barely a decade away - the world's emissions would need to drop by about 40 percent. By the middle of the century, societies would need to have zero net emissions. What might that look like? In part, it would include things such as no more gas-powered vehicles, a phaseout of coal-fired power plants and airplanes running on biofuels, he said.

"It's a drastic change," he said. "These are huge, huge shifts ... This would really be an unprecedented rate and magnitude of change."

And that's just the point - 1.5 degrees is still possible, but only if the world goes through a staggering transformation.

An early draft (leaked and published by the website Climate Home News) suggests that future scenarios of a 1.5 C warming limit would require the massive deployment of technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the air and bury it below the ground. Such technologies do not exist at anything close to the scale that would be required.

"There are now very small number of pathways [to 1.5C] that don't involve carbon removal," said Jim Skea, chair of the IPCC's Working Group III and a professor at Imperial College London.

It's not clear how scientists can best give the world's governments this message - or to what extent governments are up for hearing it.

An early leaked draft of the report said there was a "very high risk" that the world would warm more than 1.5 degrees. But a later draft, also leaked to Climate Home News, appeared to back off, instead saying that "there is no simple answer to the question of whether it is feasible to limit warming to 1.5 C . . . feasibility has multiple dimensions that need to be considered simultaneously and systematically."

None of this language is final. That's what this week in Incheon - intended to get the report ready for an official release on Monday - is all about.

"I think many people would be happy if we were further along than we are," the IPCC's Lynn said Wednesday morning in Incheon. "But in all the approval sessions that I've seen, I've seen five of them now, that has always been the case. It sort of gets there in the end."

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intergovernmental panel on climate change

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Climate scientists are struggling to find the right words for very bad news

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October 3 In Incheon, South Korea, this week, representatives of over 130 countries and about 50 scientists have packed into a large conference center going over every line of an all-important report: What chance does the planet have of keeping climate change to a moderate, controllable level?

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As the Ice Melts, NASA Will Be Watching - The New York Times

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As the Ice Melts, NASA Will Be Watching - The New York Times

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The new ICESat-2, set to launch on Saturday, can measure changes in the planet's ice that are less than the width of a pencil.

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NASA's ICESat-2 satellite, once launched, will monitor melting glaciers, ice sheets and sea ice. Credit Credit NASA

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If all goes well for NASA on Saturday, climate scientists will get a new eye in the sky that will be able to watch the Earth's ice melt practically drip by drip.

O.K., not that precisely. But the new satellite, called ICESat-2, will give researchers the sharpest look ever at melting glaciers, ice sheets and sea ice, which make up much of the Earth's frozen regions that are collectively known as the cryosphere. All that melting ice contributes to sea level rise, and ICESat (an imperfect acronym for Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite) will provide important information about how quickly it's happening.

NASA is scheduled to launch the satellite from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California at 5:46 a.m. Pacific time, or 8:46 a.m. Eastern. The agency will show the launch live on NASA.com.

Since this is ICESat-2, you know there was an earlier ICESat: It launched in 2003 and operated until 2009. Since then, NASA has been taking measurements from airplanes flying over Greenland and Antarctica, a stopgap program known as Operation IceBridge that has cost about $15 million a year.

NASA isn't simply replacing the old ICESat. Much of the cost of ICESat-2, which is about $1 billion, went into creating a much more powerful instrument.

The old satellite measured the elevation of the Earth's ice with a single laser beam; the new gizmo has six, firing 10,000 times a second. All those pulses of light will give this satellite astonishing precision. While the previous satellite took measurements that were spaced apart roughly over the length of a football field at each end zone, the new one will measure between each yard line.

NASA says it will be able to measure the change in elevation of the ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland to about a sixth of an inch, less than the width of a pencil.

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The satellite will launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Credit NASA

The satellite's instrument, called the Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System, or Atlas, will also measure the heights of forests to determine the amount of vegetation in a region, as well as monitor other attributes of land surfaces, water and clouds.

By precisely measuring the elevation of land ice, Atlas and ICESat-2 will help scientists develop a better sense of how much and how quickly that ice is melting in a warming world.

We already know that the melting that is taking place in the enormous storehouses of fresh water locked into the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica is increasing sea levels by a millimeter a year, accounting for a third of the total rise. (Other glaciers and ice caps account for another third, and the rest can be attributed to the fact that warming ocean water expands in volume.) A deeper and more precise understanding of the melting will lead to a better understanding of sea level rise.

And even though the melting of ice floating in the oceans does not add to sea level rise, measuring the height of that ice will also shed light on the effects of the fresh water on things like ocean currents.

Tom Neumann, deputy project scientist for the new satellite, said it would provide "a phenomenal picture" of changes in the planet's ice sheets and water. "It's going to enable science discoveries in the cryosphere and polar research for years to come," he said.

For more news on climate and the environment, follow @NYTClimate on Twitter.

John Schwartz is part of the climate team. Since joining The Times in 2000, he has covered science, law, technology, the space program and more, and has written for almost every section. @jswatz * Facebook

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D2 of the New York edition with the headline: Friendly Fire: To Measure Melting Of World's Glaciers, NASA's Lasers Will Be Blazing. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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The new ICESat-2, set to launch on Saturday, can measure changes in the planet's ice that are less than the width of a pencil. Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd: , our email newsletter.

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Saltmarsh Sparrows Fight to Keep Their Heads Above Water - The New York Times

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Saltmarsh Sparrows Fight to Keep Their Heads Above Water - The New York Times

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Rising sea levels are bringing more nest-flooding tides that threaten to push the birds that breed in coastal marshes along the Atlantic Coast to extinction.

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A saltmarsh sparrow chick at Hammonasset Beach State Park. Credit Credit Karsten Moran for The New York Times

HAMMONASSET BEACH STATE PARK, Conn. - The newly hatched saltmarsh sparrows are helpless, all but featherless, with reddish skin, barely visible in the evening light.

Mosquitoes buzz as Samantha Apgar holds aside a tangle of marsh grass, or salt hay, to show me the hidden nest. It's the size of half a baseball, tucked in under a tangle of grass. The incoming tide is rising over the soles of our boots and the hatchlings won't stay dry long.

Ms. Apgar, a graduate student at the University of Connecticut, is working with Christopher Elphick, an ornithologist there, to record what happens when high tides flood the nests of marsh birds. She has automatic video cameras and is also collaborating with videographers from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, one of whom has his camera trained on this nest and had recorded the hatching of these babies a couple of hours before.

She warns me that the outlook for these fragile hatchlings is grim. If they last through the night, they still have five days of increasingly high tides ahead of them until the new moon. "I don't think they're going to make it," Ms. Apgar says.

The species, which breeds in coastal marshes from Maine to Virginia, and lives only on the Atlantic Coast, has always been at the mercy of time and tide, nesting between the highest spring tides. But now a sea level rise of a fraction of an inch a year caused by climate change is pushing tides higher and higher, threatening the birds' survival. Their population has been declining about nine percent a year since the late 1990s. They now number somewhere from 40,000 to 80,000, although overall population estimates are tentative because the birds are not always easy to find.

Dr. Elphick and his colleagues recently predicted that they will reach a threshold, when the highest spring tides come too often to allow the birds time to raise their young. "After that threshold is crossed," he says, "these birds have maybe six years before they're extinct."

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The turning point may arrive sometime between 2030 and 2060, potentially giving the saltmarsh sparrow the distinction of becoming the first bird to go extinct as a direct result of rising sea levels.

Over just a few years, he said, the situation could change "from most birds in the population having a moderate chance of successfully breeding, to most birds having a poor chance of breeding."

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The birds' precarious existence is one example of the threat to the coastal marshes of the Eastern Seaboard and all the species that depend on them. The end may not come gradually for the species living on the edge.

"We could suddenly lose a lot of stuff very quickly," Dr. Elphick says. "I think that's what's scary to those of us who study this stuff. The recognition of how rapidly things can change."

In the morning, the newly hatched sparrows are gone, drowned in the night's high tide and the mother sparrow is already looking for fathers for her second brood. She can't waste time; the tides won't wait.

Those hatchlings drowned on the night of June 10, near the beginning of a nesting season that runs from May through August. Ms. Apgar followed nests at the Connecticut site throughout the season. Of 59 nests found, 40 failed. She knows that 16 were flooded and failed. The others may have, but she doesn't have the evidence. Four nests produced young that survived at least long enough to leave the nest, and she doesn't know what happened to the hatchlings in the other 15.

This is not research for the faint of heart. "They get out of the egg and pretty soon after are inundated with cold water and either drown or make it through and fledge," Ms. Apgar said. "It's a hard way to be born I think."

Dr. Elphick said it is common to come out and find "little baby chicks drowned everywhere." But, he said, "that's part of their life history. That has happened ever since they've been living in marshes, to some extent."

It is certainly hard to watch the videos that document chicks drowning when the water rises.

Rising waters at Hammonasset State Beach Park in Connecticut end the short lives of five-to-six-days-old saltmarsh sparrow chicks. Published On Credit Credit Image by Samantha Apgar

If the scientists are used to the fragility of sparrow life, some of their friends are not. Ms. Apgar recalled posting a picture of nestlings on Facebook and a friend said, "'Are they going to make it Sammie?' And I said, 'Oh Brookie, I don't think so.' And she said, 'Don't "Oh Brookie" me!'"

The birds do have what seem to be adaptations to their hard lives. The eggs can go underwater for 90 minutes at a time, surviving the temperature drop and loss of oxygen absorption through the air.

A sped-up video shows how saltmarsh sparrow eggs can survive rising tides. Published On Credit Credit Image by Samantha Apgar

When the chicks are old enough, they can climb up the marsh grass to get away from the rising water, even if they are not fully ready to leave the nest.

A sped-up video shows six-to-seven-day-old chicks escaping from rising tides Published On Credit Credit Image by Samantha Apgar

Also, the females nest and lay eggs as many times as they can, generally about five to a nest. They are seriously promiscuous. "In a quarter of nests," Dr. Elphick said, "every single chick has a different father. And in pretty much every nest, there's at least two fathers and often three or four."

Dr. Elphick says it's very difficult to pin down an evolutionary cause for a behavior, but for the female sparrows, promiscuity seems to make good sense. Mating quickly is of utmost importance so you can't be too choosy, and if you're not being picky about prospective fathers, "you may be better off mating with multiple males."

Unfortunately, none of these apparent adaptations will help if the birds don't have around 23 days between nest-flooding tides to lay eggs, incubate them and raise the chicks to the stage when they're able to leave the nest.

That's where lunar cycles and tides come in. The highest spring tides, very likely to flood the nests, occur roughly every 28 days. Whether the highest tide is at the new or full moon depends on multiyear cycles. Now, new moon tides are the highest. No matter, there is always a secondary peak midway between the highest tides. Right now those secondary peaks don't cause nest flooding as predictably as the new moon tides do.

"It is disconcerting to come to the realization that the species you're studying that doesn't seem that rare could go extinct within your lifetime," said Chris Elphick, an ornithologist at the University of Connecticut. Credit Karsten Moran for The New York Times

"They get out of the egg and pretty soon after are inundated with cold water and either drown or make it through," said Samantha Apgar, a graduate student. "It's a hard way to be born, I think." Credit Karsten Moran for The New York Times

But Dr. Elphick and his colleagues predict that the nest flooding tides will start to occur every two weeks from 2030 to 2060, despite any global changes in carbon emissions. With that timetable, the nests will flood every two weeks, which is not enough time for eggs to hatch and chicks to fledge.

The gradual increase of average sea level is only part of this story. In a 2017 paper, Christopher Field, Dr. Elphick and others included local sea level rise, daily variations in tide height and a number of other factors. They also included rates of failure from hundreds of nests at study sites in Connecticut from 2002 to 2009.

Their computer models, designed to accommodate the complexity of a reality that is far messier than a tide table, produced the prediction of the sparrow's dire future. And their conclusion showed that gradual change cannot be counted on. You can approach a cliff gradually, but the last step is pretty abrupt.

As we squished through the marsh after examining the doomed nestlings, I asked if his work felt like a deathwatch.

"It is disconcerting," he said, "to come to the realization that the species you're studying that doesn't seem that rare could go extinct within your lifetime." Then he laughed, "Yeah, for sure."

The end, though near, is not absolutely certain. The birds have moved to new habitats in the past, in the sense that the marshes of the Eastern Seaboard were not where they are now when the species appeared thousand years ago. The Hammonasset marshes were under glaciers. And the marshes were miles east.

The sparrows traveled with the marshes as the plants shifted along the changing location of the shore. Building now limits that movement, although a recent paper suggests there is more room than previously thought for coastal changes.

And the sea is rising fast. The pressure's on to come up with other approaches.

"The conservation of this species right now - and not just this species but the whole suite of things that live in salt marshes - centers around where are the places where it's possible for there to be marshes 30 years, 50 years, 80 years from now," Dr. Elphick said.

The Saltmarsh Sparrow Initiative, of which he is a part, has a plan to try to stop the population from going below 10,000 and then bringing it back up to around 25,000, by protecting both current marsh areas and potential future habitat.

One stopgap measure might be drainage ditches. Many Eastern coastal marshes like Hammonasset already have such ditches, dug in the 1920s and 30s for mosquito control. Or earlier to keep the marsh dry enough for cattle to graze on salt hay, the very plant that the saltmarsh sparrow nests in. More ditches might be dug or old ones widened or deepened.

Inevitably a sort of gallows humor evolves in studying a species that seems destined for extinction. Enter the ghost cameras.

Ms. Apgar and Dr. Elphick are making video recordings of nests during high spring tides so they can see what actually happens. At what age can the chicks climb up the grass to survive? Do they live after being inundated? What do the mothers do?

And they do this in the dark. "Most of the chicks were dying at night in the years we had been studying the birds," Dr. Elphick said. So they needed cameras that could record video at night.

Most small video cameras have infrared filters to improve colors, with one notable exception. "I wound up buying these cameras," Ms. Apgar said, holding one up for inspection, "that are actually from a paranormal activities shop."

Apparently ghost hunters also need to see in the dark. Ms. Apgar paired the cameras with lights in the infrared spectrum, which neither birds nor humans can see so the mothers and nestlings are not disturbed. It seems to be working.

But, as the sun went down and the waters rose, Ms. Apgar said that their team sometimes jokes that the cameras may also "pick up the ghosts of chicks past."

For the record, that hasn't happened yet.

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Saltmarsh Sparrows Fight to Keep Their Heads Above Water

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Rising sea levels are bringing more nest-flooding tides that threaten to push the birds that breed in coastal marshes along the Atlantic Coast to extinction. HAMMONASSET BEACH STATE PARK, Conn. - The newly hatched saltmarsh sparrows are helpless, all but featherless, with reddish skin, barely visible in the evening light.

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Many Major Airports Are Near Sea Level. A Disaster in Japan Shows What Can Go Wrong. - The New York Times

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Many Major Airports Are Near Sea Level. A Disaster in Japan Shows What Can Go Wrong. - The New York Times

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Kansai airport, which serves Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe, was inundated this past week when a typhoon hit Japan. Credit Credit Kentaro Ikushima/Mainichi Newspaper, via Associated Press

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As a powerful typhoon tore through Japan this week, travelers at Kansai International Airport looked out on a terrifying void: Where they should have seen the runway, they saw only the sea.

They also saw what could be a perilous future for low-lying airports around the world, increasingly vulnerable to the rising sea levels and more extreme storms brought about by climate change. A quarter of the world's 100 busiest airports are less than 10 meters, or 32 feet, above sea level, according to an analysis of data from Airports Council International and OpenFlights.

Twelve of those airports - including hubs in Shanghai, Rome, San Francisco and New York - are less than 5 meters above sea level.

"We were trapped," said Takayuki Kobata, a web entrepreneur who had hoped to board a Honolulu-bound plane from Kansai, a vast airport on an artificial island near Osaka. "We just had to wait for the storm to blow over."

He spent close to 36 hours trying to find a way off the flooded island, a task further complicated by a ship that ripped from its moorings and crashed into the bridge from the airport to Osaka, severely damaging the roadway.

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Passengers stranded at Kansai on Wednesday. Credit Jiji Press/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

The threat from rising waters comes as a reckoning for an industry that ranks among the major contributors to climate change. Air travel accounts for about 3 percent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, but is one of the fastest-growing emissions sources. Given current trends, emissions from international air travel will triple by 2050, the International Civil Aviation Organization has predicted.

As the aviation industry grapples with its carbon footprint, it has also started to feel the effects of global warming. Extreme heat can ground planes because hotter, thinner air makes achieving lift difficult. A changing climate can also increase turbulence.

Low-lying areas along the water have long been seen as ideal sites for building new runways and terminals, because there are fewer obstacles for the planes during takeoff and landing, and less potential for noise complaints. But coasts also provide few natural protections against flooding or high winds.

All told, extreme weather and rising sea levels today pose one of the most urgent threats to many of the world's busiest airports, which often weren't designed with global warming in mind.

Hurricane Sandy in 2012 inundated all three airports that serve New York City, crippling travel for days. Typhoon Goni closed runways at Hongqiao International Airport outside Shanghai in 2015, forcing passengers and crew members to teeter on improvised bridges of tables and chairs as they tried to reach dry ground. The worst floods in nearly a century in Kerala, India, killed more than 400 people last month, and the deluge caused Cochin Airport, a regional hub, to close for two weeks.

"We know that there are going to be impacts. And we expect those impacts to become serious," said Michael Rossell, deputy director-general at Airports Council International, a group representing airports from across the world. "Recognizing the problem is the first step, and recognizing the severity is the second. The third is: What can we do about it?"

Many airports have started to bolster their defenses.

St. Paul Downtown Airport in Minnesota, which has been frequently flooded by the Mississippi, now has a portable flood wall that can be erected if the river starts to overflow. With the help of a $28 million federal grant, La Guardia Airport in New York is adding a flood wall, rainwater pumps and a new drainage system for the airfield, as well as upgrading its emergency electrical substations and generators.

Kansai airport, which serves the bustling cities of Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe and handled almost 28 million travelers last year, faces an additional predicament. A feat of modern engineering, Kansai sits on an island three miles offshore that was built over the course of a decade from two mountains' worth of gravel and sand. The airport, which opened in 1994, was built in Osaka Bay partly to minimize noise problems but also to avoid the violent protests over land rights that are the legacy of older airports in Japan, like Narita, which serves Tokyo.

Signs of trouble came early. Engineers had expected the island to sink, on average, less than a foot a year over 50 years after the start of construction as the seabed settled under the airport's weight. But the island sank more than 30 feet in its first seven years and has continued to descend, now losing 43 feet in elevation at the last measurement.

At that rate, at least one of the airport's two runways will slip under the waves completely by 2058, according to dire predictions made in a 2015 paper by Gholamreza Mesri, a civil engineering professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and J.R. Funk, a geotechnical engineer. And with sea levels rising because of climate change, Professor Mesri added, the airport could be underwater even sooner. "You won't have an airport, you'll have a lake," he said.

Kansai airport was built on an artificial island in part to minimize noise problems. Credit Google Earth

The doomsday forecast from the American researchers has enraged some in the Japanese engineering community. "It's irresponsible," said Prof. Yoichi Watabe of the engineering faculty at Hokkaido University, who has researched Kansai airport's woes. He conceded, though, that the prediction was not entirely implausible.

Even so, Professor Watabe said, the study assumed that Japan, a nation with a sterling reputation for advanced engineering, "will just watch it sink with our thumbs in our mouths."

"We will not," he said.

To stay above the waves, Kansai airport is pumping water from the seabed beneath the island to speed up the settlement process. The main terminal rests on giant stilts that can be jacked up to keep the foundation level. The airport also uses giant pumps to drain its airfield after heavy rain, and has added to a series of sea walls on the island's perimeter.

Engineers had boasted that the walls were tall enough to withstand storms as strong as a major 1961 typhoon that caused the sea to surge nine feet. But Typhoon Jebi, which killed 11 as it tore through west Japan this week, generated a storm surge that reached almost 11 feet, a record for Osaka Bay. Waves crashed over the airport's sea walls and swamped its pumps, officials said.

To make things worse, an oil tanker unmoored by the powerful typhoon's 130 mile-per-hour winds struck and damaged the only bridge to the mainland. With nowhere to go, 8,000 people huddled in darkened terminals overnight as waves lapped at the buildings' walls, before emergency ferries and buses found a way to navigate the mangled bridge and shuttled passengers to safety.

The storm sent a tanker crashing into the bridge that links Kansai to the mainland. Credit Jiji Press/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

With the bridge out of service, thousands were stranded at the airport. Credit Kyodo/Reuters

It remains unclear when the battered airport will fully reopen. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Thursday that Kansai would reopen on Friday to domestic flights, using the shorter of its two runways, which escaped the worst of the damage.

At a televised news conference Thursday, Yoshiyuki Yamaya, the president of the airport's operator, was contrite. "We geared up for a typhoon, but the typhoon was far stronger than we had expected," he said. "We were too optimistic."

For more news on climate and the environment, follow @NYTClimate on Twitter.

Hiroko Tabuchi is a climate reporter. She joined The Times in 2008, and was part of the team awarded the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. She previously wrote about Japanese economics, business and technology from Tokyo. @HirokoTabuchi * Facebook

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Many Major Airports Are Near Sea Level. A Disaster in Japan Shows What Can Go Wrong.

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Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd: , our email newsletter. As a powerful typhoon tore through Japan this week, travelers at Kansai International Airport looked out on a terrifying void: Where they should have seen the runway, they saw only the sea.

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Fires predicted to get worse in California

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Fires predicted to get worse in California

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Heat waves will grow more severe and persistent, shortening the lives of thousands of Californians. Wildfires will burn more of the state's forests. The ocean will rise higher and faster, exposing California to billions in damage along the coast.

These are some of the threats California will face from climate change in coming decades, according to a new statewide assessment released Monday by the California Natural Resources Agency.

The projections come as Californians contend with destructive wildfires, brutal heat spells and record ocean temperatures that scientists say have the fingerprints of global warming.

"This year has been kind of a harbinger of potential problems to come," said Daniel Cayan, a climate researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and one of the scientists coordinating the report. "The number of extremes that we've seen is consistent with what model projections are pointing to, and they're giving us an example of what we need to prepare for."

State leaders vowed to act on the research, even as the Trump administration moves to unravel climate change regulations and allow more pollution from cars, trucks and coal-fired power plants.

"In California, facts and science still matter," Gov. Jerry Brown said in a statement. "These findings are profoundly serious and will continue to guide us as we confront the apocalyptic threat of irreversible climate change."

The state's assessment draws on the latest science, including more than 40 new peer-reviewed studies, to project the effects of the continued rise in greenhouse gases on California's weather, water, ecosystems and people and offer guidance on how officials across the state might adapt.

It's the fourth such report since 2006, when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger ordered a climate change assessment as precursor to the Global Warming Solutions Act, the pioneering law California adopted that year to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels.

This latest one for the first time scales down global climate models to project climate's effect at the regional level or smaller. That approach is intended to provide local officials on the ground with more relevant, community-level information they can use to prepare.

"The difference between the San Joaquin Valley and the nearby coastal or Sierra Nevada mountains is enormous, so we have to have ways to unpack the large-scale global model calculations," Cayan said.

Rising temperatures, deadlier heat waves

California has already warmed 1 to 2 degrees since the beginning of the 20th century as a result of the human-caused buildup of greenhouse gases. That figure could rise to between 5.6 degrees and 8.8 degrees by 2100, depending on the amount and rate of pollution spewed into the atmosphere, according to the report.

Those climbing temperatures could cause 6,700 to 11,300 more heat-related deaths annually in California by midcentury, the assessment found. Such fatalities will dominate economic damage to the state from climate change, costing up to $50 billion a year by midcentury.

Scientists have long projected more intense and longer-lasting heat waves by midcentury but have observed those changes occurring faster than anticipated.

"Something that used to happen every 10 years is happening every year," said Rupa Basu, chief of air and epidemiology for the state's Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment.

Adding to the risks, scientists say, are trends toward higher humidity and warmer nights. Such conditions hinder people's ability to recuperate and raise the likelihood of hospital and emergency room visits for a variety of illnesses, from heat stroke and dehydration to heart attacks, kidney disease, gastrointestinal illness and preterm births.

The report also highlights shortcomings in how authorities classify heat waves and alert the public.

In one study cited in the assessment, researchers identified 19 heat waves that landed more than 11,000 people in the hospital between 1999 and 2000. The National Weather Service issued heat advisories for just six of the events.

That led researchers to devise a new way of identifying heat spells that may fall below established temperature thresholds but pose similar health risks. Such episodes, called heat-health events, are defined not by temperature readings but on the public health effects they cause at the local level, particularly to the elderly, young children and other populations most prone to falling ill or dying from the heat.

Modeling by researchers found those health-threatening heat spells will become a persistent fixture in summer months within a few decades, lasting two weeks longer on average in the Central Valley by midcentury.

More air conditioning could attenuate some of the harm, at least for those who can afford it.

Somewhat counterintuitively, researchers expect the health damage from higher temperatures to be worse in coastal areas with historically milder climates, where people are less acclimated to extreme heat and fewer have air conditioning. Researchers have found heat-related deaths to be less common in hotter, inland regions where more people have air conditioning units in their homes.

Seas rise higher than anticipated

As the ocean continues to warm, California's coast will face more beach erosion, flooding and storm damage.

Until recently, scientists and state policymakers worked with a projection that sea level rise by the end of this century could amount to about 5.48 feet in California under the worst case scenario. But the latest reports and state policies are now accounting for the extreme possibility that sea level rise could exceed 9 feet.

These broader projections incorporate the potential rapid melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet.

Even if the sea rose 6.56 feet rather than the higher possible extreme now adopted by the state, more than 250,000 residents, $38 billion in property and 1,400 miles of roads along the coast are at risk of flooding during a severe storm in Southern California, according to a study led by the U.S. Geological Survey.

Among the most vulnerable communities:

San Diego, Coronado, Imperial Beach and National City in San Diego County

Huntington Beach, Seal Beach and Newport Beach in Orange County

Long Beach, Los Angeles and Malibu in Los Angeles County

Scientists modeled a 100-year flood - a severe but realistic storm that has a 1 in 100 chance of occurring in any given year this century - based on the latest climate science and sea level rise projections.

Almost all of those areas are at lower elevation and were built on former marshes, researchers said. San Diego County has the most wetlands prone to permanent flooding, and Ventura County is most prone to flooding of agricultural land.

Sea level projections are often presented at a global scale that's too abstract, said the researchers, who hope their localized projections help the public better understand what's really at stake when it comes to critical roadways and utilities, businesses and high-value properties.

"It highlights the urgency to act now and to manage the coast appropriately," said Patrick Barnard, research director of the USGS Climate Impacts and Coastal Processes Team and a co-author of the study.

One such response is the creation of natural shoreline infrastructure, such as vegetated dunes, native oyster reefs or seagrass beds that help buffer wave action and hold back the encroaching sea, according to a report led by the Nature Conservancy.

At Surfers Point in Ventura County, officials turned an eroding parking lot and collapsing bike path into a cobble beach backed by vegetated dune. It has fended off erosion, widened the beach and become the most visited beach in Ventura County, the report said. During high wave conditions in the winter of 2015-16, no damage occurred at the project site: Wave run-up reached the bike path only where dunes were absent.

Other parts of the local shorelines were not so lucky: Ventura Pier was damaged in the storm and the Pierpoint neighborhood suffered inundation, the report said.

Northern California - the source of much of the state's water supply - is likely to grow a bit wetter with climate change. But global warming will alter the timing and form of precipitation, making it tougher for the state to hold on to it.

Warmer temperatures mean mountains will get less snow and more rain and the state snowpack - nature's reservoir - will melt earlier. That will shorten the season of high stream flows, giving water managers less time to capture the additional water.

Rising sea levels also will increase salinity levels in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the state's main transfer point for Northern California supplies headed south. As a result, more freshwater must move through the delta to maintain water quality. And higher temperatures will drive up agricultural water use north of the delta.

Taken together, those effects could reduce delta exports to San Joaquin Valley agriculture and Southland cities by 10% by 2060, researchers found. The amount of water stored in key Northern California reservoirs at the end of the summer season could decline by a quarter.

"The good news is that we may have the same amount of water. But it may come in a different form and a different time," said John Andrew, assistant deputy director of the Department of Water Resources. "We're going to have to be a much better manager of the resource."

The water world has proposed various responses to expected shifts in California's hydrology.

Those include modifying reservoir operating rules to allow dam managers to hold on to peak winter flows, which they must now sometimes release to create space for spring snowmelt. Floodwater could be used to recharge the San Joaquin Valley's over-pumped groundwater basins. Existing reservoirs could be expanded and new ones built.

Southern California water agencies want to construct two massive tunnels under the delta to divert high flows from the Sacramento River and transport them to pumping operations that send supplies south. Water districts are also moving to develop more local resources, such as recycled water.

"Everybody has their favorite solution," Andrew said. "[But] there is no favorite solution. It's all of them in some amount."

The study found that computer modeling showed a wetting trend in Northern California and part of Central California, while most of Central California and Southern California would experience a drying trend by 2060.

Another study released as part of the climate assessment found that, on average, annual precipitation was expected to increase in most parts of the state but that the projected changes were small compared to natural variability - California's year-to-year precipitation levels swing up and down more than any other state in the lower 48.

More destructive wildfires

As rising temperatures drive more wildfire in California, the greatest increase is expected in the forests of the Sierra Nevada and southern Cascade mountain ranges.

Forest area burned every year could more than double by the end of the century, according to research by UC Merced professor Anthony Westerling.

Climate change will have more of a wildfire effect in mountain forests in the northern two-thirds of the state than in other parts of fire-prone California because those regions are cooler and moister. When mountain regions grow hotter, soil and vegetation dries out more quickly in the summer, fostering conditions conducive to the spread of wildfire.

Westerling modeled increases in fires of more than 1,000 acres based on two scenarios of global greenhouse gas emissions. Under one scenario, emissions peak and then begin to decline in midcentury. In the second, they continue to climb until late in the century. Under the first scenario, annual average burned forest in much of the Sierra increased by 48% by midcentury and by 120% by century's end. Under the higher emissions scenario, burned area could surge by as much as 400% by century's end.

In recent years, bark-beetle infestations killed more than 100 million drought-stressed trees in California. But contrary to conventional wisdom, the study found that in the near term, those dead trees would not significantly increase wildfire.

Westerling cited two reasons for that. When dead needles fall from trees within a few years of a fire, the risk of them fueling an intense blaze drops. And while the dieback is extensive, it is patchy and intermixed with green trees.

Decades from now, when beetle-killed trees fall, the heavy fuel load of downed logs and limbs could increase the risk of mass fires. But Westerling said the effects can't be quantified because there is no historical analogue on which to base the models.

More air conditioning, but lower gas bills

Rising temperatures will increase demand for electricity across the state as more people install and use air conditioners - even in coastal areas where people have traditionally gone without them.

"If San Francisco with its pleasant coastal climate gets Fresno's hot climate by end of century, even cool San Franciscans will install window units in existing apartments and new construction will be built with central air conditioning," according to one study included in the state's climate assessment.

UC Berkeley environmental economics professor Max Auffhammer, who authored the study that analyzed utility bills for households across the state, found a silver lining: increased electricity demand will be more than offset by reductions in natural gas use for heating as a result of milder winters.

"Electricity consumption is going to go up in the summer," he said. "But it looks like climate change is going to save many California consumers a bunch of money on their heating bills in the winter."

More air conditioning will place added strain on the electrical grid by increasing peak demand. To avoid blackouts, utilities will have to make costly upgrades, such as additional generating capacity, substations and energy storage facilities, to meet demand during hot months.

State energy officials said the assessment underscores the urgent need not only for swift global reductions in greenhouse gas emissions but also local actions to protect California from warming that's already threatening people, natural resources and infrastructure.

"We're seeing that in the fire situation, we're seeing that in sea level rise, we're seeing that in heat spells, in declining snowpack," said California Energy Commission Chairman Robert Weisenmiller. "The climate is changing now so we need to be adapting our communities."

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Climate change will be deadlier, more destructive and costlier for California than previously believed, state warns

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Heat waves will grow more severe and persistent, shortening the lives of thousands of Californians. Wildfires will burn through more of the state's forests and the ocean will rise higher and faster, causing billions in damage. These are some of the threats California faces from climate change.

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Post-Hurricane Harvey, Houston Will Continue to Struggle

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Post-Hurricane Harvey, Houston Will Continue to Struggle

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HOUSTON-It's a hypermodern skill, the ability to spot a viral moment in the face of strife. As Hurricane Harvey beat down on Houston, there was former mayor Bill White, inching his way through waist-deep water, hiking staff in his right hand and laptop-stuffed briefcase tucked like a football in his left. And there was his neighbor, who, while waiting for White at the water's edge, couldn't resist a snapshot.

The photo-a prominent Houstonian weathering the storm, his gated home behind him-came to symbolize the equal-opportunity devastation of Harvey. It was a year ago this weekend that Harvey gutted hundreds of neighborhoods across the city, from upscale Kellywood to working-class Homestead. The blistering post-2016 news cycle ensured the storm would shrink from headlines after a few weeks. But to visit Houston is to absorb that, for an untold number of residents, the biggest rainstorm in the history of the continental U.S. continues to replay like a nightmare on loop.

For White, Hurricane Harvey began on Friday, August 25, 2017. Houston is no stranger to heavy rains, and neither is White: As mayor from 2004 to 2010, he governed the city through Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Ike. No small storms, yet as White monitored the news that day, and early rainfall projections began to rise from 20 inches, to 25, to 30, he realized this one was different. "When the estimates of the rainfall amount...went out of the range of anything that had been projected to me, had ever been viable when I was mayor," he told me, "I realized that it was going to be pretty bad."

White's home sits just above the 100-year floodplain on Buffalo Bayou. It's built up on stilts so flood water can flow underneath. Yet in White's 19 years of living there, the bayou had never swelled to such an extreme point.

That changed Sunday morning, when White awoke to a "murmuring sound," like a river. It was water rushing beneath the house. He spent the next few hours moving what furniture he could upstairs, keepsakes and family photos into the attic. A recent tennis partner called, distraught: A close friend had died the night before, she told him, when she'd taken an off-ramp on the interstate and gone underwater. "I knew then that there was going to be lot of human tragedy," he told me.

The water continued to rise. By noon, it had made the ten-foot climb to the deck. Touching the bottom layers of the house, the current had shifted from the almost pleasant rhythm of a river to a "rumbling sound, like a train." "It was an eerie sound," White recalled. "I was surrounded by moving water on all sides. It was like being on a boat."

Within fifteen minutes, the water found its way inside and began creeping up the walls. It began "popping" and "pooling" out of the floor sockets, like tiny geysers.

It was time to go.

He threw on wool socks, hiking boots, a backpack, and put his iPad, laptop, and some papers in his briefcase. The neighbors had called to urge him along. He found his hiking staff, waded ankle deep to his front door, and began his trek into the coffee-colored river outside.

Thus White-formerly the one to call the shots, to monitor the rescue efforts, to communicate with Washington-experienced his city's most defining tragedy as a citizen. The thoughts roaming the mind of a flood victim are plenty: Is my family okay? (Yes, White's wife, Andrea, was out of town.) Did I forget to move something valuable upstairs? (Yes, Andrea's collection of cookbooks.) Where am I going to stay? (With a neighbor.)

For a flood victim who happens to be a former public official, however, there is one question that reverberates above the others: How the hell did we get here?

***

In two days, Hurricane Harvey dumped 51 inches of rain on greater Houston. More than 75 people died in Texas. Of Houston's 50 victims, most died by drowning.

The catastrophic event has prompted an existential crisis of sorts in Houston. Almost every recent administration, including White's, has made flood mitigation and relief a top priority. With each year comes newer technology, more sophisticated takes on infrastructure, and a deeper understanding of the threats posed by global warming. Yet Harvey has brought the question of Houston's flood preparedness into sharp relief. For a city looking to outpace Chicago as the third largest city in the country, it's an unenviable position to be in. In the last year, Houston officials have thus scrambled to probe what went wrong, and what went right, in the lead up to Harvey, all the while attempting to rebuild the homes and lives of those displaced.

The City of Houston and Harris County have responded aggressively in the last year. Houston has already amended its building code to require higher structure elevations in the floodplain, while Harris County has placed a $2.5 billion flood mitigation referendum on the ballot. Saturday was the special election. But the more the city and county take on, the clearer it becomes that federal intervention is needed to shore up the sprawling metropolis, home to the largest medical center in the world and a significant concentration of the nation's oil refineries. And with record federal deficits, along with a never-ending stream of stopgap funding bills in Congress, the kind of help Houston needs is almost certainly not on the way.

"There was, to my shocking surprise, no money appropriated for flood mitigation for months where there was continuing resolutions in Congress last year," White told me. "After Katrina hit, the Louisiana Delegation, amongst Senators, would not permit there to be a continuing resolution without not only city money that could be used for rebuilding, but also Army Corps mitigation funding."

Only earlier this year did Congress at last include mitigation funding in its spending bills. Yet it remains to be determined how those funds will be allocated among Texas and other hurricane-devastated states such as Florida. So large-scale projects, such as building a third reservoir and creating more surface detention, have yet to get underway.

This is not to say that Harvey caught Houston entirely off guard. Devastating as it was, Harvey's impact could have been far worse-if such a thing is even fathomable-had the two current reservoirs, as well surface detention ponds created during White's administration, not been in place. But as Houston's population continues to skyrocket, the incentive to prioritize flood mitigation over development could prove less and less convincing.

Which means that with every storm, lower-income neighborhoods in floodplains could be left further and further behind. Harvey was equal opportunity in its destruction, perhaps, but not in its aftermath.

"Let me say this. Certain areas of Houston have been taken care of," said Herb Mitchell, district manager for state Representative Senfronia Thompson. " And certain others have not."

Those fault lines were evident on Saturday morning, when Mayor Sylvester Turner toured low-income neighborhoods hurt by Harvey as part of the storm's anniversary.

Around 9 a.m., Turner's shiny black SUV slowed to a stop in Kashmere Gardens, an historically African American community and one of the poorest neighborhoods in Houston. The city has been criticized for its seeming abandonment of Kashmere Gardens while resources to wealthier areas such as Meyerland appear to be plenty. Turner was here, he told residents, to remind them that they hadn't been "left behind."

It wasn't a bad instinct. Recent studies have shown how Harris County residents have endured "unprecedented psychological distress" in the months since Harvey. A University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston study found that, of those who lost their homes, nearly 50% reported feeling nervous, hopeless, restless, worthless, and depressed.

So for people like 73-year-old Joyce Follie who, one year removed, have still not been able to move back into their homes, it was tough to take Turner at his word. Turner approached her in her home's overgrown front yard, where she sat in a fold-out chair surrounded by her daughter, granddaughter, and two great grandchildren. All generations had grown up in this home. "I wanted to come around and let you know," he told her, "that we haven't forgotten about you."

"I hope not," she said with a weary laugh. "I hope not."

Across the street, Dorothy Rainey had only moved back in one week before. Sixty-eight years old and wheelchair bound, Rainey spoke to Turner in her living room, empty save for paint-sheet curtains and a clock. Four feet of water had destroyed her home. She didn't have flood insurance. A non-profit had done most of the repairs.

"Look, I wanted to come by and let you know that we have not forgotten anybody, ok?" Turner said.

"Ok," Rainey responded. "Because we thought you had."

***

Bill White's living room is pristine-contemporary furniture framed by orchids, hardwood floors that gleam beside floor-to-ceiling windows. That it was ravaged by floodwater just one year ago is almost inconceivable.

Of course, such is the difference between White and someone like, say, Dorothy Rainey. A gutted first floor means months in a friend's guesthouse while private contractors restore it. It does not mean year-long displacement, or clinging to the hope that a visit from the mayor may yield more than a photo-op.

For White, it's yet another strange-if not disembodying-element of experiencing city-wide tragedy as a private citizen, rather than as an official. "In northeast Houston I've seen drywall torn down, piles of stuff out front waiting for pickup, even in houses where people have moved back in," he told me. "And I'm most concerned about the health consequences in places where there hasn't been sufficient mold remediation."

We talk about projects the city could take on. Expensive solutions, such as drainage. More cost-effective ones like surface detention pools that can double as "lakes" for parks. Regular sediment removal from bayous, such as the one behind his own home. He's optimistic that as the city waits for federal money to come through, the county's $2.5 billion bond, if it passes, will help fund the kinds of projects that, next time, keep families like his and Rainey's alike on safer ground.

Because there will be a next time. It's an anxiety-provoking statement, especially now, as the flood's one-year anniversary reopens old wounds, deepens the ones that remain unhealed. But White told me that, in the years since his time as mayor, he's found a perverse sense of peace in knowing there's only so much a city can do.

He recalled preparing for Hurricane Katrina by reading The Control of Nature by John McPhee. "Part of the book is a story about the hubris of human beings trying to control to course of the Mississippi River," he said. You can build levees. You can maintain them. But someday, inevitably, water will breach them. "The point is that there are some forces of nature that are too big to try to control. You're going to have to adapt."

"And I believe Houston has done that, will continue to do that," he said. "We're resilient."

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Hurricane Harvey Is Houston's Unending Nightmare

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HOUSTON-It's a hypermodern skill, the ability to spot a viral moment in the face of strife. As Hurricane Harvey beat down on Houston, there was former mayor Bill White, inching his way through waist-deep water, hiking staff in his right hand and laptop-stuffed briefcase tucked like a football in his left.

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Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change (Published 2018)

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We knew everything we needed to know, and nothing stood in our way. Nothing, that is, except ourselves. A tragedy in two acts.

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Left to Louisiana’s Tides, a Village Fights for Time - The New York Times

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Left to Louisiana’s Tides, a Village Fights for Time - The New York Times

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JEAN LAFITTE, La. - From a Cessna flying 4,000 feet above Louisiana's coast, what strikes you first is how much is already lost. Northward from the Gulf, slivers of barrier island give way to the open water of Barataria Bay as it billows toward an inevitable merger with Little Lake, its name now a lie. Ever-widening bayous course through what were once dense wetlands, and a cross-stitch of oil field canals stamp the marsh like Chinese characters.

Saltwater intrusion, the result of subsidence, sea-level rise and erosion, has killed off the live oaks and bald cypress. Stands of roseau cane and native grasses have been reduced to brown pulp by feral hogs, orange-fanged nutria and a voracious aphid-like invader from Asia. A relentless succession of hurricanes and tropical storms - three last season alone - has accelerated the decay. In all, more than 2,000 square miles, an expanse larger than the state of Delaware, have disappeared since 1932.

Out toward the horizon, a fishing village appears on a fingerling of land, tenuously gripping the banks of a bending bayou. It sits defenseless, all but surrounded by encroaching basins of water. Just two miles north is the jagged tip of a fortresslike levee, a primary line of defense for greater New Orleans, whose skyline looms in the distance. Everything south of that 14-foot wall of demarcation, including the gritty little town of Jean Lafitte, has effectively been left to the tides.

Jean Lafitte may be just a pinprick on the map, but it is also a harbinger of an uncertain future. As climate change contributes to rising sea levels, threatening to submerge land from Miami to Bangladesh, the question for Lafitte, as for many coastal areas across the globe, is less whether it will succumb than when - and to what degree scarce public resources should be invested in artificially extending its life.

One sweltering evening last July, almost everyone from around Lafitte gathered near dusk at the bayou's edge to celebrate the expenditure of nearly $4 million of those scarce public resources. There were shrimpers and crabbers, tug captains and roughnecks, teachers and cops. All had come for the ribbon cutting for a grand new seafood pavilion, the latest gambit by the longtime mayor, Timothy P. Kerner, to save the town from drowning.

Free beer sloshed in plastic cups as folks ambled about the cavernous, open-sided shed, sampling shrimp rémoulade and alligator-stuffed mushrooms. Once the politicians had finished flattering one another from the podium, a Cajun band, fronted by a fiddler in a shimmery blue dress, cranked up a rollicking fais-dodo.

Amid the celebration, a fireplug of a man in crisp jeans and a starched white shirt cheek-kissed and bro-hugged his way through the crowd. This was Timmy Kerner's party. In his third decade as mayor, Mr. Kerner had managed to persuade the parish, state and federal governments to pay for his signature showcase at the entry to town.

It might seem counterintuitive to keep building on land that is submerging. But Mr. Kerner did not see it as his job to take a 10,000-foot view. In the years since Hurricane Katrina, he had grown weary of being rebuffed in his quixotic campaign to encircle Lafitte with a tall and impregnable levee. He could rhapsodize all he wanted about preserving his community's authentic way of life. The cost-benefit calculus - more than $1 billion to protect fewer than 7,000 people - always weighed against him.

So he had set out to change it. His strategy was to secure so much public investment for Jean Lafitte that it would eventually become too valuable to abandon. In a decade, he had built a 1,300-seat auditorium, a library, a wetlands museum, a civic center and a baseball park. Jean Lafitte did not have a stop light, but it had a senior center, a medical clinic, an art gallery, a boxing club, a nature trail and a visitor center where animatronic puppets acted out the story of its privateer namesake.

Some of the facilities had been used sparingly, and many at the grand opening questioned whether the seafood pavilion would be much different. To the mayor that was largely beside the point. What mattered was that the structure existed, that its poured concrete and steel beams made Lafitte that much more permanent.

"Do we lose that investment, or do we protect it?" Mr. Kerner asked, barely audible above the din. "I hope people will see that, hey, not only are we fighting hard to exist, but, you know, maybe this place is worth saving."

The sky began to dim over the bayou. "It's such a beautiful place, and it's getting prettier by the day," he said, ticking off his improvement projects. "This is just another step at building the community. It sends a message that we're not going anywhere.

"No matter what, we're not leaving."

Louisiana's "working coast" is dotted with communities that, like Lafitte, may not outlast the people who currently live there: Cocodrie, Delacroix, Dulac, Grand Isle, Isle de Jean Charles, Kraemer, Leeville, Paradis, Pointe-aux-Chenes, Venice.

A fourth of the state's wetlands are already gone, with heavy losses tallied from 2005 to 2008, when the coast was battered in succession by Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Gustav and Ike. In 2011, the federal government retired 35 place names for islands and bays and passes and ponds that had simply ceased to exist.

State planners believe another 2,000 square miles, or even double that, could be overtaken in 50 years as the land sinks, canals widen and sea levels rise because of climate change. Recent studies show that glacial melting is accelerating in Antarctica and Greenland, driving sea level rise on the Gulf Coast.

Although the recession of Louisiana's coast has slowed somewhat this decade, a football field's worth of wetlands still vanishes every 100 minutes, according to the United States Geological Survey. That is one of the highest rates on the planet, accounting for 90 percent of such losses in the continental United States.

The Gulf Restoration Network, a nonprofit conservation group, calculates that there are currently 358,000 people and 116,000 houses in Louisiana census tracts that would be swamped in the surge of a catastrophic hurricane by 2062. The Geological Survey predicts that in 200 years the state's wetlands could be gone altogether.

"It is the largest ecological catastrophe in North America since the Dust Bowl," declared Oliver A. Houck, a professor of environmental law at Tulane University in New Orleans who has written extensively about land loss in the state.

In addition to the effects of climate change, human engineering has contributed broadly to the losses. Since the early 18th century, the construction of levees on the Mississippi and the closing of its distributaries have altered natural hydrology and stifled land-building silt deposits from spring floods. Property owners and government regulators have allowed the degradation of swamp and marshland, first for farming and cypress-logging and then, more insatiably, for oil and natural gas exploration.

Since prospectors first discovered oil in Louisiana 117 years ago, 57,465 wells have been drilled in 10 coastal parishes, according to the state's Department of Natural Resources. Thousands of miles of canals have been dredged through marshes for access. They broaden each year from erosion caused by boat traffic and storm currents, even as their spoil banks block natural water flow. A 50,000-mile thicket of pipelines connects rigs to refineries and tank farms across the state.

After years of laissez-faire regulation, some consequential finger-pointing has begun in the courts, where parish governments and private landowners are for the first time suing energy companies to rebuild their land. To date that burden has fallen mostly on taxpayers, even when the property being repaired is owned by oil and gas interests, an examination of state records shows.

The impact extends far beyond Louisiana's shoreline.

The slender coastal zone, stretching west from Breton Sound across the mouth of the Mississippi to Sabine Pass, contains 37 percent of the estuarine marsh and the largest commercial fishery in the contiguous 48 states. Its ports support 24 percent of the nation's waterborne commerce and a fifth of its oil supply. The coast provides winter habitat for five million migratory waterfowl. Along with man-made levees and flood walls, it is the buffer that keeps the Gulf of Mexico from draining into New Orleans, much of which sits below sea level.

Last year, Louisiana officials acknowledged for the first time that even with a vast restoration program, even with tens of billions of dollars they do not have, they no longer believed they could build land fast enough to offset the losses. Plotted on a map, their projections show 40-mile swaths, encompassing Jean Lafitte and everything below it, splashed in red to denote that, without action, they will disappear within decades. The crisis has become existential, with policymakers confronting choices about which communities they can afford to rescue.

In the starkest illustration, a $43 million federal grant is being used to relocate the nearly 100 residents of Isle de Jean Charles, a narrow spit in lower Terrebonne Parish that has lost 98 percent of its land over 60 years. In a national experiment, the money will be used to buy land and build homes for those willing to move to higher ground on a sugar farm near Houma, about 40 miles north.

To dramatize the state's plight, Gov. John Bel Edwards last year declared the entire coast in "a state of crisis" and successfully lobbied the White House to expedite permits for restoration projects. "The sense of urgency has only magnified," Mr. Edwards said in an interview. "We are literally in a race against time."

Mr. Edwards, a Democrat, insists that his state is "not in full retreat mode," that "the science shows there is a window of opportunity" to sustain portions of the coast. But in a state not known for fiscal oversight, concerns linger about whether good money will be thrown after bad.

"People argue that if you make the investments appropriately it will be fine, and it could be," said Mitch Landrieu, the outgoing mayor of New Orleans. "But nobody really ever has the appetite to have a conversation about cutting off your arms so you can still walk."

The sputter and thrum of boat motors announces the morning along Bayou Barataria well before sunup. Burly men in rubber boots load ice and bait into trawlers moored behind their houses and prepare to push off in the dark.

On a clear day out on the Pen, a four-mile lake that was farmland a century ago, the silhouettes of New Orleans office towers and the Phillips 66 Alliance Refinery are visible to the north and east. Lines of crab traps stretch across the flat water, buoyed with floats painted in their owners' signature colors, like jockeys' silks. Alligator snouts skim the surface of nearby canals, and a boat's approach sends a blue heron flapping into labored flight.

Jean Lafitte, the pirate and smuggler, patrolled nearby waters before helping to defend New Orleans in the War of 1812, earning a pardon in exchange. Many here trace their lineage back to his day or to the 18th century Acadian settlers whose cuisine and dialect still prevail (although the Frenchman might be confused to hear locals call their home G ene Lafitte).

The people of Lafitte have lived off the water for generations - trapping and skinning muskrats and other marsh dwellers, fishing, crabbing, oystering, building and repairing boats, ferrying workers and supplies to offshore rigs. Many accept the irony that the water may eventually destroy the economy it built.

As it is, cheap imports and domestic farming of shrimp and fish have depressed prices and made it all but impossible to turn a profit. The global oil glut has reduced drilling activity on the coast by almost two-thirds since 2014. Recent graduates of Fisher High are as likely to seek careers in a casino or pharmacy as on a Lafitte skiff, the iconic fan-tailed fishing boats designed here.

Jean Lafitte is laid out for six linear miles along a two-lane road that curves around the east bank of the bayou. Newer houses on land subdivided from a 19th-century sugar cane plantation were built atop six-foot mounds to keep the water at bay. Many older structures have been elevated hydraulically and placed on pillars 10 feet or higher, a process that can cost nearly as much as the house is worth. While government programs pick up some of the expense, there is not enough funding, and some homeowners cannot afford their share, which often exceeds $100,000.

Yet many cannot imagine living anywhere else. They complain that the bloodless cost-benefit formulas determining which communities get protection give little weight to the qualities that make Lafitte desirable (the name Lafitte is used to refer to the town and its adjacent unincorporated areas). Children, they point out, still spend barefoot summers tubing and fishing and training bird dogs to leap off docks. And when they graduate from high school, three-fourths will have been together since prekindergarten.

The policymakers "don't place value on anything but the money, not the longevity of these communities, not the culture," said Tracy Kuhns, 64, a longtime resident of the Barataria community across the bayou from Jean Lafitte. "One of the problems in this country is that people don't have any connection to where they live. People really want that. Why would you take it away from people who already have it?"

Ms. Kuhns, the president of Louisiana Bayoukeeper, an advocacy group for water quality and clean fisheries, pointed out that she did not lock her door (which flies open all day as her 17 grandchildren come and go). There have been but two murders in Jean Lafitte in the past 20 years, compared with 3,829 in New Orleans.

At the center of town sits St. Anthony Catholic Church, which sponsors the Blessing of the Fleet Festival when brown shrimp season opens each spring. The first catch fills the freezers of cousins and neighbors before anything left is sold to Nunez Seafood and other dockside wholesalers.

After a long day on the water, some may wet their whistle with $2.75 Budweisers at Mitch Martin's Welcome Inn, where a swamp-pop band plays on Wednesday nights and gray-haired ladies line dance.

The tavern is run by Timothy and Thomas Wiseman, brothers better known as White Boy and Zabo. Almost everybody in Lafitte has a nickname, some more self-explanatory than others: Skinny Boy, Sandbags, Lunch Meat, Pink Cow. When Tom Wiseman, 52, was a child, someone decided he looked like another guy nicknamed Zabo. "Forty years it has followed me now," he said.

The Wisemans find that the absence of levee protection reinforces the sense of Lafitte as a place apart, for better and worse. "We're outside the line, and they don't care about us," Tim Wiseman, 54, said. "It's always been like that."

"Now we just expect water and damage every five years," his brother said. "It's a way of life."

"And you know what? It still does not make us want to leave," Tim said. "Are we economically feasible? Hell no. But this place will survive. If we end up living on rafts, there will be people living here."

Although only two feet above sea level, Lafitte rarely experienced significant damage from hurricanes until 2005. That year, Katrina's 120-mile-per-hour winds stripped roofs off houses; a month later, Rita sent enough water coursing through lower Jefferson Parish to dislodge whitewashed tombs from graveyards. Homeowners in Lafitte found skulls and an artificial hip among the debris. Together, the storms forced the demolition of more than 150 houses.

There would be more of the same with Hurricanes Gustav and Ike in 2008, Tropical Storm Lee in 2011 and Hurricane Isaac in 2012. With only 2,000 residents, the Town of Jean Lafitte racked up $9.3 million in federal flood insurance payments in the eight years after Katrina, according to an analysis by Rui Hui, a researcher at the University of California, Davis. (Statewide, the program has paid out $19.5 billion in claims since 1978, or 30 percent of the national total, including $1 billion for properties that have flooded repeatedly, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.)

"The first time, I sat on the sofa and just watched it come in," remembered Chris Dufrene, 73, whose house flooded three times before he had it elevated eight feet three years ago. "Worst feeling I've ever had. Nothing you can do about it."

Shrimpers and guides had been noticing astonishing changes out on the water for years. Shambles of fishing cabins sat stranded on pilings, more distant from shore each season. Duck blinds had dissolved into muck. Land bridges no longer bridged.

"I've been out here since 1981, and the beaches are eroding, the salt water's intruding and all the islands in Barataria estuary that were protecting the land are washing away," said Troy Schultz, 54, who trawls and crabs with his son, Troy Jr., 28. "Big Island is gone. Cat Island is gone. St. Mary's Island is gone. They were miles long. Now it's so open that every time you get squalls and storms it pulls up the marsh grass."

These days, the main road through Jean Lafitte floods almost any time a gusty storm blows in from the south. A mere sideswipe from Tropical Storm Cindy last June pushed several feet of water into streets and yards. The merciless hurricane season of 2017, with Harvey followed by Irma, Maria and Nate, made clear that the town's days may be numbered.

After Katrina left 1,833 dead in 2005, local, state and federal governments spent more than $20 billion to redesign failed and inadequate levees and pumps for metropolitan New Orleans. Even those improvements may not be sufficient to spare the area's more than 1.3 million residents from another monster storm.

But in Lafitte, only 25 miles south, the hurricane defense system consists mainly of Mr. Kerner and whichever men he can employ to sling tens of thousands of 25-pound sandbags, often for days on end.

The mayor feels the threat viscerally, like many with deep roots here. His family settled in Lafitte in the early 1800s. He married a local girl at 18 (Darla Kerner was 16), and worked as a commercial fisherman, barkeep and tax collector before assuming his place as heir to one of the country's most enduring political dynasties.

Mr. Kerner has been mayor for 26 of his 58 years. With a gap of only eight years in the 1950s, a Kerner has held Lafitte's top office since 1888, when his great-grandfather became justice of the peace. His father, Leo E. Kerner Jr., spearheaded the effort to incorporate Jean Lafitte in 1974 and became its first mayor, serving 17 years.

Leo Kerner had been a welterweight champ in the Navy, and taught his boys how to spar, in politics as in the ring. The current mayor is known in Jefferson Parish, Baton Rouge and Washington as a single-minded scrapper who fights best from a defensive crouch. He can be quick to lose his temper when he feels Lafitte is being disrespected, but is also fast to apologize and hug it out.

"He's like a big teddy bear," said Susan H. Maclay, president of the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority - West, which maintains levees on the west bank of the Mississippi. "It's hard to tell him no when he needs help."

Mr. Kerner, a self-described Kennedy Democrat, has made a career of going hat in hand to Republican administrations. He has little choice, as Jean Lafitte's operating budget hovers around $2 million. Legislative audits show that virtually all of the $27 million amassed by Mr. Kerner for construction since Katrina came from federal, state and parish grants. He has lobbied for scores of millions more for bridge and road improvements.

Paradoxically, perhaps, some of the funding - including about a third of the cost of the seafood pavilion - has come from federal recovery grants that flow south each time the town is bludgeoned by a storm.

As the water creeps closer, Mr. Kerner has increased the value of Jean Lafitte's physical plant sevenfold in a decade. And yet, on his central mission to ensure his town's future, he considers himself a failure.

"When I ran for this office," Mr. Kerner said, "I ran to provide a levee. That was my dream. I guess I haven't done a very good job so far, because we don't have one."

If Lafitte has a chip on its shoulder, it is not without cause.

When the Army Corps of Engineers first mapped out Louisiana's hurricane protection system in the 1970s and 1980s, it drew the footprint just north of Lafitte. The priority was to protect New Orleans, its booming West Bank suburbs and Louisiana's ports (the state has five of the country's 12 largest). Feasibility studies repeatedly concluded that extending the levee to defend Lafitte was "not economically justifiable."

That left Mr. Kerner to devise his own plan, and find a way to pay for it. His concept was to phase in the construction of a chain of 10 linked ring levees, 65 miles in all, that would enclose each populated sector of Lafitte. Cost dictated that the walls of dirt, steel and concrete would be seven-and-a-half feet high at the outset, enough for protection from modest storms but not from a major hurricane. A levee of at least twice that height is typically needed to meet the standard of "100-year protection," meaning it should withstand flooding from a hurricane with a 1 percent chance of occurring in a given year.

For a while, the corps encouraged the mayor to pursue small federal grants to build segments of the system. In 2003, with about $10 million, construction began on the first link, which will eventually contain the town's schools and municipal buildings.

Then came Katrina, producing storm surge that overwhelmed portions of the New Orleans-area levee and flood wall system. In addressing the damage, Congress raised standards for the height and strength of the levees that the Corps of Engineers would build, effectively disqualifying the Lafitte project.

Mr. Kerner also found little support locally, where the regional levee authority with jurisdiction over Lafitte was focused on protecting areas closer to New Orleans. In 2007, David J. Bindewald Sr., then the president of the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority - West, told Mr. Kerner explicitly that there would be no money for his levees.

Instead, he sent Mr. Kerner a letter offering "several thousand un-filled sand bags and sand sufficient to fill the bags" along with "a quantity of shovels."

The furious mayor figured he could do better than that on his own, and persuaded allies in the Legislature to create the Lafitte Area Independent Levee District. Funded by a small property tax, the levee authority pays Mr. Kerner $12,000 a year as its president, on top of his mayoral base salary of $79,538, according to legislative audits.

Mr. Kerner's power play did not instantly change the essential dynamic. In 2009, after Hurricane Gustav, the corps began studying options for a new levee that would span a stretch of the lower coastal zone. Only one of several routes under consideration would have protected Lafitte. But at a levee board meeting in 2011, corps officials announced their determination that none of the proposed alignments could be justified economically.

"What do you suggest we do?" an exasperated Mr. Kerner asked Mark Wingate, the corps engineer managing the project.

Mr. Wingate said he suggested studying nonstructural options, including relocation.

"You're reading my mind," Mr. Kerner responded, "because when I saw that map the first thing I thought was that I wanted to relocate your jawbone." He nodded at Mr. Wingate's two associates. "And your jawbone and your jawbone."

In the parking lot after the meeting, the corps officials stiffened when they saw the pugilistic mayor striding purposefully toward them. But he was only coming to apologize.

Bruised but not defeated, Mr. Kerner thought there might be another way.

Four months after Katrina, the State of Louisiana had created the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority to centralize planning. The authority was tasked with devising a master plan for the coast, which it did for the first time in 2007, and with updating it every five years. Science, not politics, was to control its deliberations about the most cost-effective ways to protect people and property.

The ambitious 2012 update pledged to use "every tool in the toolbox" to improve flood protection "in every community in coastal Louisiana." It proposed a $50 billion buffet of projects - marsh creation, barrier island restoration, oyster shell reefs, river sediment diversions - that it asserted could start to neutralize land loss over the next 23 years and outpace it by year 30. There also would be billions for house elevations and flood walls - including $870 million to build Mr. Kerner's ring levees at full "100-year" height: 16 feet.

Over the past decade, the authority has grabbed money from a bag of sources to undertake 135 projects at a cost to the state of more than $2.4 billion (with another $2 billion budgeted for the next three years). Sixty-five square miles of land have been built or improved, along with 297 miles of levee and 60 miles of barrier islands and berms, according to the authority.

The coast these days is awash in ambitious engineering projects. Near Jean Lafitte, for instance, more than 1,000 acres of marsh have been created in and around Bayou Dupont in an $82 million state-managed project that pumped sand from the Mississippi up to 13 miles away. Where open water stood in 2009, there is now walkable land, thick with saplings and shrubs.

But before money could be appropriated for the Lafitte levees, the master plan's authors adopted far more pessimistic forecasts of the impact of climate change. They effectively doubled their previous 50-year projections for likely sea level rise to more than two feet, the highest rate in the country, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

That made the worst-case scenario in the 2012 master plan the best case for 2017 and led to a startling reversal: Louisiana could slow the submergence of the coast, but not arrest it. Even if the plan was somehow fully funded, and the state succeeded in adding or maintaining 800 square miles of wetlands over 50 years, there would still be a net loss of at least 400 square miles and possibly as many as 3,300.

That recalibration necessarily shifted the state's approach. "Once you accept the diagnosis that much of south Louisiana is going to disappear, you still have to have a strategic retreat," said David Muth, director of the National Wildlife Federation's Gulf Restoration Program. "How do you plan this shrinking of the footprint, which is complicated by socioeconomics and by real questions about how fast sea level will rise and how fast you can build wetlands?"

Torbjörn E. Törnqvist, a Tulane geologist who is an authority on subsidence, warned that decisions about places like Lafitte would be "a piece of cake compared to what's coming - because a little down the line we're going to be talking about communities not of 2,000 people but of much bigger things."

And then there's the matter of where to find the master plan's aspirational $50 billion - twice the entire state budget.

To date, the only dependable financing model has been catastrophe, namely the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. BP and its drilling partners agreed to pay $7.1 billion over 15 years to settle litigation by the state, and the money has been earmarked for coastal restoration. Mark Davis, director of Tulane's Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy, analogizes that to "paying for a gym membership by winning pie-eating contests."

The state and its coastal parishes have been counting on about $176 million a year from federal offshore oil leases under a revenue-sharing law passed in 2006. But steep declines in prices and drilling have lowered those projections.

All told, even under the rosiest circumstances, the $50 billion master plan, which many experts consider inadequate, lacks at least $30 billion in revenue.

"All of us believe our citizens deserve more than probably we can deliver," said Bren Haase, the authority's chief of planning and research.

For its 2017 revision, the authority split its theoretical budget between hopeful restoration efforts, like rebuilding marshes and barrier islands, and defensive risk-reduction projects like raising levees and elevating houses. It re-evaluated proposals with a refined formula that weighed each project's cost against the flood damage it would avert.

The price tag for the Lafitte ring levees had risen to $1.2 billion, equating to more than $170,000 per resident. Despite Mr. Kerner's efforts to rebalance the cost-benefit calculus, the annual savings amounted to less than a tenth of that, placing it near the bottom on the state's list. When the authority published its draft in January last year, the mayor found that his ring levees, his lifeline for Lafitte, had been discarded.

The mayor and his constituents felt betrayed once again. "It just makes all your fears justified," said Ray Griffin, the manager of Cochiara's Marina. "When they make a decision like that they just basically slap you in the face and say bye."

In an ecosystem as multifaceted as the Louisiana coast, the protection of one habitat may pose a mortal threat to another, or at least be perceived that way. Flood control is a zero-sum game. The water has to go somewhere.

So there is natural suspicion in Lafitte about the most audacious engineering proposal in the state master plan, the $1.4 billion Mid-Barataria sediment diversion. The experimental project, which is under design, would carve a gap in the levee on the Mississippi's west bank just southeast of Lafitte. When the river is high, floodgates could be opened to redirect sediment-rich water into adjoining marshland at up to 75,000 cubic feet per second.

This occasional freeing of the river may build land more gradually than the continual pumping of dredged sand. But environmental groups argue that it will do so in a self-sustaining way at comparatively low cost. The state estimates that the diversion will deposit enough sediment over 50 years to fill the Superdome more than 22 times.

"We know we need benefits now," Mr. Haase said, "but if we're not doing anything to fundamentally change the causes of our land loss, then we're perhaps not investing our dollars wisely."

In Lafitte's fishing community, there is deep concern, with some scientific backing, that flushing fresh water into brackish marshes and bays will imbalance the salinity needed to nurture shrimp, oysters and crab. Scientists argue that salinity will change with or without the diversion, but seafood industry groups have threatened to sue if it is built.

"It will completely kill these fishing communities," said Clinton Guidry, a Lafitte resident who once presided over the Louisiana Shrimp Association. "Is that the trade-off you want? If you lose shrimp fishermen for one generation, they're gone forever."

For Tim Kerner, the Mid-Barataria diversion provided a bargaining chip. After his 100-year levees were axed from the master plan, he continued to push for funds to complete the ring system at lower height. The state owed Jean Lafitte, he argued, because the diversion would make the town even more vulnerable.

Things came to a head in January last year when Mr. Kerner made his case, loudly, at a meeting with state officials. Seated nearby was his great benefactor in Baton Rouge, State Senate President John A. Alario Jr., a soft-spoken power broker whose district includes Lafitte.

"You know," Mr. Kerner told Johnny Bradberry, the chairman of the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, "if I was a senator or a state rep from my area sitting at this table, I would be very upset. You have projects all along the coast, and this area, where the Senate president is from, you have nothing but a sediment diversion that nobody really wants."

He reminded the officials of all of the money the state had been spending in Lafitte - the bridges, the civic center, the seafood pavilion. "It's so inconsistent for C.P.R.A. to say we're not worth saving when other government agencies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars," he said. "It's throwing away the investment of tax dollars you already put in this place."

When the final master plan was presented to the Legislature in June, language had been inserted that the state and the Lafitte levee authority would be "focused on securing nearly $308 million" for the lower tidal protection levees and flood walls. The plan also called for spending $200 million in Lafitte over 30 years to elevate 1,237 houses, flood-proof nine businesses and buy out two property owners. (Coastwide, the master plan calls for spending a theoretical $6 billion over 50 years to elevate, improve or buy out 26,200 properties.)

The question now is how quickly money will materialize. Mr. Kerner believes the levees can be completed for considerably less than the $308 million estimate. Regardless, the state has budgeted only $35.5 million for them over the next four years.

"Those 2,000 folks down there would like very much for us to be committed to a $1 billion ring levee," said Mr. Edwards, the governor. "Well, we just can't do that. But we haven't given up on them either."

Prospects seem dim for a federal bailout to shore up Lafitte and the rest of Louisiana's coast. Preserving the state's wetlands is a tough political sell because many Americans do not appreciate the magnitude of their self-interest there. Increasingly, Louisiana faces competition from more populous coastal zones that also are at grave risk, like South Florida, metropolitan New York and the Texas Gulf.

The only other pockets deep enough to fill the financial gap belong to oil and gas. Even in a time of retrenchment, the energy industry remains among Louisiana's most vital employers, revenue generators and civic and political donors. But with drilling in decline and the BP oil spill a fresh memory, Louisianans seem newly receptive to holding the industry accountable for the consequences of its activities.

In a recent poll of 565 Louisianans by NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune, 72 percent said the oil and gas industry should help pay for coastal restoration along with the government. (Mr. Kerner happens to agree.) Another 18 percent said the industry should bear the cost alone. Only half said they were willing to pay higher taxes to redeem the coast.

In 2013, with the political landscape shifting, the levee authority charged with flood control in New Orleans sued 97 oil and gas companies, presenting a novel claim.

"Everybody understood that the industry was responsible for a significant part of the damage and had placed an increased burden on those responsible for protecting the population from storm surge," said John M. Barry, the New Orleans author who spearheaded the litigation as vice president of the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority - East. "So it seemed clear there would have to be some avenue to get them to accept their liability."

Over the prior 20 years, plaintiffs' lawyers had won judgments and settlements in Louisiana cases demanding the cleanup of oil field contamination. The flood protection authority hired one of them - Gladstone N. Jones III of New Orleans - and constructed arguments evocative of those used 30 years earlier against Big Tobacco: Energy companies had known for decades that they were destroying the marsh but ignored legal and contractual obligations to repair it, at great cost to taxpayers.

There is considerable documentation of advance knowledge. Scientists and conservationists have sounded alarms since the 1920s about the loss of land to oil exploration. Documents uncovered through discovery show that the industry's own studies began making the connection nearly 50 years ago.

In 1972, a report commissioned by oil and gas transmission companies estimated that pipelines decimated up to two square miles of marsh a year and that access canals destroyed at least that much. Seventeen years later, a study of aerial photographs for the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, which represents major producers, concluded that "the direct and indirect effects of canal development tend to be the overwhelming cause of wetland losses." In 2000, a study sponsored in part by the Gas Research Institute estimated that the industry bore responsibility for 36 percent of Louisiana's coastal land loss between 1932 and 1990.

More recent research links the industry to subsidence - the compaction and sinking of sediment. "Rapid subsidence and associated wetland loss were largely induced by extraction of hydrocarbons," concluded a 2005 study of the Mississippi Delta plain by the Geological Survey. It added that the collapse of Louisiana's marsh "appears to be unprecedented and not repeated in the geological record of the past 1,000 years."

And yet, some Louisiana lawmakers, both in Congress and the State Legislature, do not support efforts to regulate what may be the most lasting environmental legacy of fossil fuels: climate-driven sea level rise. Among them is Representative Steve Scalise, the House majority whip, whose district includes Lafitte. Mr. Scalise, a Republican, applauded Mr. Trump's announcement in June that the United States would withdraw from the global Paris accord to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

The state's leadership initially viewed the levee authority lawsuit as a direct assault. The Republican governor at the time, Bobby Jindal, demanded that it be withdrawn and removed Mr. Barry and others on the authority. He orchestrated passage of a law that would have invalidated the litigation had a state judge not declared it unconstitutional.

"It's that old saying - you don't bite the hand that feeds you," said Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser, also a Republican. "I don't say they have no effect, the canals, but I think it's a money grab against an industry that has been very good to Louisiana."

In 2015, a federal judge dismissed the levee authority lawsuit, primarily on grounds that the agency lacked legal standing. That ruling has been upheld on appeal. But the original lawsuit was followed quickly by scores of others, some filed by private landowners and a total of 43 by six different parish governments (the equivalent of counties).

In August, a different federal judge ruled that pipeline companies must repair erosion that had occurred since 1953 along canals on 20,000 acres of privately owned wetlands in Plaquemines Parish. The first of the lawsuits filed by the parishes is scheduled to be heard in state court in Plaquemines in 2019.

The parishes, all represented by the Baton Rouge firm of Talbot, Carmouche & Marcello, claim that oil and gas companies violated state permitting laws in the dredging of canals, as well as regulations requiring production sites to be "cleared, revegetated, detoxified and otherwise restored as near as practicable to their original condition upon termination of operations." The suits seek actual restoration of degraded land in addition to monetary damages.

In 2016, when the governor's office changed parties, Mr. Edwards reversed Mr. Jindal's stance and intervened in support of the parish cases. "Oil and gas is a huge component of our economy, and we want them to be successful," Mr. Edwards said. "But we also want them to act responsibly when they explore for and produce hydrocarbons."

Oil and gas industry leaders acknowledge that their potential exposure is substantial. They warn they will not roll over to trial lawyers who they believe are extorting them for a global settlement.

"We're going to fight every single last issue because we don't believe we've done anything wrong," said Gifford Briggs, vice president of the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association, which represents independent producers and service companies.

Chris John, a former Democratic congressman who presides over the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, said the lawsuits failed to recognize numerous other causes of coastal degradation and would not be settled. He said that "the energy industry has conducted its operations in accordance with government-issued permits and applicable federal, state and local regulations."

Mr. Briggs echoed that defense. "Yes, if you dig a canal or build a slip, is there technically a loss of marsh or land? Sure," he said. "But that's done through permit. That doesn't mean there's any additional liability or responsibility beyond fulfilling the obligations of the permit."

As it is, taxpayers have spent at least $588 million to repair oil-and-gas-related damage in coastal Louisiana, according to an analysis of state records. That accounts for 84 percent of the money spent on more than 200 projects over three decades by the federal Coastal Wetlands, Planning, Protection and Restoration Act. Enacted in 1990, the program is funded by taxes on fishing gear, imported watercraft, boat fuel and motors.

Because petroleum interests own or lease much of the coast, those taxpayer-funded restoration efforts often benefit the very industry that shredded the marsh in the first place. In Terrebonne Parish, for instance, $39 million was spent to repair breaches in a land bridge across north Lake Mechant caused by erosion and oil access canals. Much of the property is owned by Apache Corporation and Louisiana Land and Exploration, both major oil and gas companies, parish records show, and operators have included ConocoPhillips, Texaco and Humble Oil (a precursor of Exxon Mobil).

Jean Lafitte has not yet reached the tipping point when bankers and insurers perceive that the lifetime of their loans and obligations could exceed the lifetime of the town. Indeed, real estate values are relatively high, if only because there is so little to be had.

But there are early signs of an exodus, particularly among younger residents. The population of the area declined by 21 percent between 2000 and 2010, although estimates suggest it has rebounded slightly this decade. Enrollment at the two public schools dropped 27 percent from the peak before Katrina and Rita, but has risen by 10 percent since.

Mr. Kerner believes the declines reflect temporary dislocations. But some, like Buttercup Mancuso, have left for good. She, her husband and three of their children evacuated their rental house in lower Lafitte before it flooded during Hurricane Isaac in 2012. They returned to find mold sprouting two feet up the walls.

The family abandoned their belongings except for their photographs. "Losing everything once was enough for me," Ms. Mancuso, 43, said. "I just couldn't do it again." They moved to the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, and eventually to North Carolina.

Travis Johnson, 70, a retired Army and commercial helicopter pilot who moved to Barataria in 2000, said that at his age he would gladly take a government buyout for his waterfront house.

"I drove out of here during Hurricane Rita with water flowing over the hood of my Jeep," he said. "Should one delay evacuation, it is not possible to escape. I don't want a lot of complications."

But Lafitte's lifers, for the most part, seem resigned to wait things out. The centuries spent fishing and trapping have built a resilient and self-reliant culture. More than 250 years since the Acadians were expelled from Nova Scotia, there remains a deep resistance to another forced exile.

"People that don't understand it say, 'Why don't you just move away?'" said Ms. Kuhns, the Louisiana Bayoukeeper president, who refuses to join her daughter, Ms. Mancuso, on the other side of the levee. "The people who are connected to these communities don't think that way. It's a whole culture that's connected to the earth and the water. You can't replicate it."

And so the men sandbag. Last hurricane season, they stacked them by the thousands in anticipation of Tropical Storm Cindy, then unstacked them when the floodwater receded. They did it again for Hurricane Harvey and once more for Nate.

The mayor supervises up and down the road from his white Ford Expedition, crossing himself as he passes the Catholic church. He pitches in long enough to let his back start aching, then carps that it's because the young guys today don't know how to properly swing and catch.

He remembers each storm as a fight, tallying them as wins and losses. In the old days, they would stack 200,000 sandbags. "It was like being in a war zone," Mr. Kerner said. "We wouldn't go to bed for two or three days at a time."

With sections of two of the ring levees complete, the men got by with only 20,000 sandbags when Nate narrowly missed Lafitte last October. "Each time you just have to be ready and fight it as if it's going to be the worst thing that ever happened," Mr. Kerner said. "And then you may have to do it again a week later."

The mayor has developed a sixth sense for the telltale signs of whether Lafitte will flood. As Cindy moved in last June, he watched the tide rising near the Goose Bayou bridge: "That water won't quit," he cursed. "Look at the whitecaps. That's what I don't want to see." Soon the water was lapping at his tailpipe.

Four months later, on the night Nate landed near Biloxi, Miss., he divined better news from the bayou's outward flow, indicating that the leading edge had curled in harmlessly from the north. "That's it," he said. "It's over."

As he drove home, eyelids drooping, Mr. Kerner could not help feeling annoyed that the town had expended so much effort for no reason. Then he remembered that no one had been hurt, no one had been washed out of his or her home or stranded in distress. "Such a relief," he thought.

He eased into bed, bone-weary and sore, like an aging boxer, and lost himself in reveries of shiny new buildings and 16-foot levees - whatever might spare Jean Lafitte from the water, for now.

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Left to Louisiana's Tides, a Village Fights for Time

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JEAN LAFITTE, La. - From a Cessna flying 4,000 feet above Louisiana's coast, what strikes you first is how much is already lost. Northward from the Gulf, slivers of barrier island give way to the open water of Barataria Bay as it billows toward an inevitable merger with Little Lake, its name now a lie.

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5 Plants and Animals Utterly Confused by Climate Change - The New York Times

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5 Plants and Animals Utterly Confused by Climate Change - The New York Times

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Global warming is causing spring to arrive early and autumn to come late in many places, and not all species are adapting at the same rate.

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Credit... Lauren Kolesinskas for The New York Times

Every year, as the seasons change, a complex ballet unfolds around the world. Trees in the Northern Hemisphere leaf out in the spring as frost recedes. Caterpillars hatch to gorge on leaves. Bees and butterflies emerge to pollinate flowers. Birds leave the Southern Hemisphere and fly thousands of miles to lay eggs and feast on insects in the north.

All of these species stay in sync with each other by relying on environmental cues, much as ballet dancers move to orchestral music.

But global warming is changing the music, with spring now arriving several weeks earlier in parts of the world than it did a few decades ago. Not all species are adjusting to this warming at the same rate, and, as a result, some are falling out of step.

Scientists who study the changes in plants and animals triggered by seasons have a term for this: phenological mismatch. And they're still trying to understand exactly how such mismatches - like the blooming of a flower before its pollinator emerges - might affect ecosystems.

In some cases, species might simply adapt by shifting their ranges, or eating different foods. But if species can't adapt quickly enough, these mismatches could have "significant negative impacts," said Madeleine Rubenstein, a biologist at the United States Geological Survey's National Climate Change and Wildlife Science Center.

"If you look at the past history of climate on earth, there has never been such a dramatic, rapid, change in the climate," said Andrea Santangeli, a postdoctoral researcher at the Finnish Museum of Natural History. "Species have to respond really fast," he said, "that's really unprecedented."

Here are five examples of mismatch, just one of the many threats that species face from global warming, that scientists have discovered so far:

The early spider orchid relies on deception to reproduce. Each spring, the orchid, whose bulbous crimson body looks like an insect, releases a pheromone that tricks solitary male bees into thinking the plant is a mating partner - a key step for pollination.

This ruse, which scientists call pseudocopulation, works because the orchid tends to bloom during a specific window each spring - shortly after lonely male bees emerge from hibernation but before female bees appear.

Yet with spring coming earlier, female bees are now emerging sooner and luring the male bees away from the lovelorn orchid, according to a 2014 study from Britain.

By examining data collected in herbariums and in the field over a century, the researchers found that the gap between the times when male bees and female bees emerge shrinks by about 6.6 days for each degree Celsius of warming, giving the orchid less opportunity to reproduce.

"The main finding is that things are getting increasingly bad for orchid pollination," said Anthony Davy, a professor of biological science at the University of East Anglia, and the lead author of the paper. For this orchid - which is already rare - the future looks bleak, he said.

The European pied flycatcher runs on a tight schedule each spring.

From its wintering grounds in Africa, the bird flies thousands of miles north to Europe to lay eggs in time for the emergence of winter moth caterpillars, which appear for a few weeks each spring to munch on young oak leaves.

By timing this just right, the flycatchers ensure there's enough food around when their hungry chicks hatch. In a series of studies in the 2000s, however, scientists in the Netherlands showed that many flycatchers were starting to miss this narrow window.

As spring temperatures warmed, oak trees were leafing out earlier and peak caterpillar season was arriving up to two weeks sooner in some places. But many flycatchers, which appear to schedule their departure from Africa based on the length of day there, were not getting to Europe early enough for their spring meals.

In the parts of the Netherlands where peak caterpillar season had advanced the fastest, the scientists later found, flycatcher populations dwindled sharply. "That was the big discovery that suggested this mismatch could have real consequences for populations," said Christiaan Both, an ecologist at the University of Groningen.

Climate change doesn't just cause missed connections. In some cases, the advance of warmer weather can lead to perilous meetings.

In Finland, for example, the Northern lapwing and Eurasian curlew have usually built their ground nests on barley fields after farmers have sown their crops in the spring. But as temperatures have risen, the birds are now increasingly laying their eggs before the farmers get to the fields, which means their well-concealed nests are more likely to get destroyed by tractors and other machinery.

Looking at 38 years of data, researchers found that farmers in Finland are now sowing their fields a week earlier in response to warmer temperatures, but the birds are laying their eggstwo to three weeks earlier. "This has created a phenological mismatch," said Mr. Santangeli, the lead author of the study. "The response we'll see is declines of these birds."

Caribou in western Greenland follow a strict seasonal diet. In the winter, they eat lichen along the coast. In the spring and summer, they venture inland to give birth to their calves and eat the Arctic plants that grow there.

As Greenland has warmed up and sea ice has declined, however, those inland Arctic plants have been emerging earlier - with some plant species now greening 26 days earlier than they did a decade ago. But the caribou have not shifted their migration as quickly. And scientists have documented a troubling trend in the region: More caribou calves appear to be dying early in years when the spring plant growth preceded the caribou's calving season.

While that study only found a correlation between warmer temperatures and caribou calf deaths, "it's consistent with the idea that mismatch is disadvantageous," said Eric Post, an ecology professor at the University of California, Davis. When Arctic plants green up earlier, they may become tougher and less nutritious by the time the caribou get there and start eating them.

Why don't the caribou speed up their migration? One possibility is that their reproductive cycles respond most strongly to seasonal signals like the length of the day, whereas plants respond more strongly to local temperatures, which are rising.

In theory, if given enough time, the caribou might eventually adjust as natural selection takes its course and favors individuals that calve earlier. But with the Arctic warming faster than the rest of the globe, Dr. Post said, "the question is whether things are changing too fast for evolution to matter."

Climate change doesn't just cause mismatches in the spring. Consider the snowshoe hare, whose fur coat has evolved to change from brown to white during the winter for camouflage. As the earth has warmed, however, snow cover in the hare's habitat melts sooner, leaving the animal more exposed to predators.

"Camouflage is critical to keep prey animals alive," said L. Scott Mills, a professor of wildlife biology at the University of Montana who studies the impacts of camouflage mismatch on species like the snowshoe hare.

For every week the hare is mismatched, Dr. Mills and his colleagues found, it had a 7 percent higher chance of being killed by predators like the lynx.

Currently, the hare is only mismatched by a week or two. But by midcentury, Dr. Mills said, that could extend up to eight weeks. If that were to happen, he said, the hare "would start declining toward extinction."

There is some good news for the snowshoe hare, however. Where evolution was previously thought to take millions of years, scientists now think an animal like the hare could adapt in five to 10 generations, especially if those parts of the hare population which are more adaptable are protected.

"It does give us an avenue for hope," Dr. Mills said. "It's not a foregone conclusion that species with phenological mismatch are going to go extinct."

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5 Plants and Animals Utterly Confused by Climate Change

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Global warming is causing spring to arrive early and autumn to come late in many places, and not all species are adapting at the same rate. Every year, as the seasons change, a complex ballet unfolds around the world. Trees in the Northern Hemisphere leaf out in the spring as frost recedes.

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Can Dirt Save the Earth? - The New York Times

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Can Dirt Save the Earth? - The New York Times

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When John Wick and his wife, Peggy Rathmann, bought their ranch in Marin County, Calif., in 1998, it was mostly because they needed more space. Rathmann is an acclaimed children's book author - "Officer Buckle and Gloria" won a Caldecott Medal in 1996 - and their apartment in San Francisco had become cluttered with her illustrations. They picked out the 540-acre ranch in Nicasio mostly for its large barn, which they planned to remake into a spacious studio. Wick, a former construction foreman - they met when he oversaw a renovation of her bathroom - was eager to tackle the project. He knew the area well, having grown up one town away, in Woodacre, where he had what he describes as a "free-range" childhood: little supervision and lots of biking, rope-swinging and playing in the area's fields and glens.

The couple quickly settled into their bucolic new surroundings. Wick began fixing leaks in the barn. Rathmann loved watching the many animals, including ravens, deer and the occasional gopher, from the large porch. She even trained the resident towhees, small brown birds, to eat seed from her hand. So smitten were they with the wildlife, in fact, that they decided to return their ranch to a wilder state. For nearly a century, this had been dairy country, and the rounded, coastal hills were terraced from decades of grazing. Wick and Rathmann would often come home and find, to their annoyance, cows standing on their porch. The first step they took toward what they imagined would be a more pristine state was to revoke the access enjoyed by the rancher whose cows wandered their property.

Within months of the herd's departure, the landscape began to change. Brush encroached on meadow. Dried-out, uneaten grass hindered new growth. A mysterious disease struck their oak trees. The land seemed to be losing its vitality. "Our vision of wilderness was failing," Wick told me recently. "Our naïve idea was not working out so well."

Wick was especially bothered by the advance of a prickly, yellow-flowered invasive weed called the woolly distaff thistle. He pulled it, mowed it, doused it with herbicides. But the distaff kept moving into what had been pasture. He thought about renting goats to eat the weeds and brush, but they were too expensive. He even considered introducing wild elk, but the bureaucratic hurdles seemed too onerous.

Then Wick and Rathmann met a rangeland ecologist named Jeff Creque. Instead of fighting against what you dislike, Creque suggested, focus on cultivating what you want. Squeeze out weeds by fostering conditions that favor grasses. Creque, who spent 25 years as an organic-pear-and-apple farmer in Northern California before earning a Ph.D. in rangeland ecology, also recommended that they bring back the cows. Grasslands and grazing animals, he pointed out, had evolved together. Unlike trees, grasses don't shed their leaves at the end of the growing season; they depend on animals for defoliation and the recycling of nutrients. The manure and urine from grazing animals fuels healthy growth. If done right, Creque said, grazing could be restorative.

This view ran counter to a lot of conservationist thought, as well as a great deal of evidence. Grazing has been blamed for turning vast swaths of the world into deserts. But from Creque's perspective, how you graze makes all the difference. If the ruminants move like wild buffalo, in dense herds, never staying in one place for too long, the land benefits from the momentary disturbance. If you simply let them loose and then round them up a few months later - often called the "Columbus method" - your land is more likely to end up hard-packed and barren.

Wick was persuaded. He began preparing for the cows' return. He dug wells for water, pounded in steel posts and strung nonbarbed wire. He even bought a molasses lick to supplement the animals' diet of dry thatch. He didn't want medicated livestock excreting drugs that might harm the worms and insects living in his soil - most cows are routinely dewormed - so he tracked down a herd of untreated cows and borrowed them for the summer of 2005.

The cows beat back the encroaching brush. Within weeks of their arrival, new and different kinds of grass began sprouting. Shallow-rooted annuals, which die once they're chewed on, gave way to deep-rooted perennials, which can recover after moderate grazing. By summer's end, the cows, which had arrived shaggy and wild-eyed after a winter spent near the sea, were fat with shiny coats. When Wick returned the herd to its owner that fall, collectively it had gained about 50,000 pounds. Wick needed to take an extra trip with his trailer to cart the cows away. That struck him as remarkable. The land seemed richer than before, the grass lusher. Meadowlarks and other animals were more abundant. Where had that additional truckload of animal flesh come from?

Creque had an answer for him. The carbohydrates that fattened the cows had come from the atmosphere, by way of the grass they ate. Grasses, he liked to say, were like straws sipping carbon from the air, bringing it back to earth. Creque's quiet observation stuck with Wick and Rathmann. It clearly illustrated a concept that Creque had repeatedly tried to explain to them: Carbon, the building block of life, was constantly flowing from atmosphere to plants into animals and then back into the atmosphere. And it hinted at something that Wick and Rathmann had yet to consider: Plants could be deliberately used to pull carbon out of the sky.

Climate change often evokes images of smokestacks, and for good reason: The single largest source of carbon emissions related to human activity is heat and power generation, which accounts for about one-quarter of the carbon we put into the atmosphere. Often overlooked, though, is how we use land, which contributes almost as much. The erosion and degradation of soil caused by plowing, intense grazing and clear-cutting has played a significant role in the atmospheric accumulation of heat-trapping gases. The process is an ancient one. Ice cores from Greenland, which contain air samples trapped thousands of years ago, reveal increases in greenhouse gases that correspond with the rise of farming in Mesopotamia.

Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, agricultural practices and animal husbandry have released an estimated 135 gigatons - 135 billion metric tons - of carbon into the atmosphere, according to Rattan Lal, a soil scientist at Ohio State University. Even at current rates, that's more than a decade's worth of carbon dioxide emissions from all human sources. The world is warming not only because fossil fuels are being burned, but also because soils, forests and wetlands are being ravaged.

In recent years, some scientists have begun to ask whether we can put some of that carbon back into the soil and into living ecosystems, like grasslands and forests. This notion, known as carbon farming, has gained traction as it becomes clear that simply reducing emissions will not sufficiently limit global warming. According to the 2014 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an authority on climate science that operates under the auspices of the United Nations, humankind also needs to remove some of the carbon already in the atmosphere to avoid, say, the collapse of polar glaciers and the inundation of coastal cities worldwide. "We can't just reduce emissions," Keith Paustian, a soil scientist at Colorado State University and an author of an earlier I.P.C.C. report, told me. "It's all hands on deck. Things like soil and land use - everything is important."

Some of the proposed methods to begin this drawdown include scrubbing the air with great air-conditioner-like machines; fertilizing the oceans with iron dust to prompt algal blooms that, when they die, carry captured carbon to the bottom of the sea; capturing and storing the carbon dioxide that results when energy is produced by burning trees and other plants that removed carbon from the atmosphere during their growth; and crushing and spreading certain types of rock, like basalt, that naturally absorb atmospheric carbon. None of these approaches are yet proved or affordable at the scale needed to make a difference. The most obvious hurdle is the additional energy some of them require, which, unless it comes from a free, renewable source, adds more costs.

Plants, however, remove carbon from the atmosphere already, require no additional power and grow essentially free. During photosynthesis they harness the sun's energy to make sugars by combining hydrogen atoms (acquired from water molecules) with carbon atoms (from carbon dioxide), while emitting oxygen as a byproduct. (Lest we forget, the fossil fuels that now power civilization contain carbon removed from the air during photosynthesis millions of years ago.) Every spring, as the Northern Hemisphere greens, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere dips, before rising again the following fall and winter as foliage dies. Some scientists describe this fluctuation as the earth breathing.

Nearly all the carbon that enters the biosphere is captured during photosynthesis, and as it moves through life's web, every organism takes a cut for its own energy needs, releasing carbon dioxide as exhaust. This circular voyage is the short-term carbon cycle. Carbon farming seeks to interfere with this cycle, slowing the release of carbon back into the atmosphere. The practice is often conceptualized and discussed in terms of storing carbon, but really the idea is to change the flow of carbon so that, for a time at least, the carbon leaving a given ecosystem is less than the carbon entering it.

Dozens of land-management practices are thought to achieve this feat. Planting or restoring forests, for one: Trees lock up carbon in woody material. Another is adding biochar, a charcoal made from heated organic material, directly to soil. Or restoring certain wetlands that have an immense capacity to hold carbon. (Coal beds are the fossilized remains of ancient marshes and peatlands.)

More than one-third of earth's ice-free surface is devoted to agriculture, meaning that much of it is already managed intensively. Carbon farming's fundamental conceit is that if we change how we treat this land, we could turn huge areas of the earth's surface into a carbon sponge. Instead of relying solely on technology to remove greenhouse gases from the air, we could harness an ancient and natural process, photosynthesis, to pump carbon into what's called the pedosphere, the thin skin of living soil at the earth's surface. If adopted widely enough, such practices could, in theory, begin to remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, nudging us toward a less perilous climate trajectory than our current one.

In a 2016 paper, Pete Smith, a soil scientist at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, and the influential climate scientist James Hansen argued that land-management practices are one of the few affordable options available today for drawing down carbon. "What's surprising to me is that we've not done it sooner," says Smith, who is also a lead author on a recent U.N. report that explores carbon-dioxide-removal technologies. "This has the potential to make a huge difference." Otherwise, Hansen told me, we're leaving the problem to our grandchildren. "That assumption that somehow young people, and people later this century, are going to figure out how to suck it out of the air - that's a pretty big burden to place on them," he said.

The I.P.C.C. is preparing a special report on climate change and land use, to be finalized in 2019, that will consider in greater detail the potential of sequestering carbon in soil. But for now the biggest international effort to promote carbon farming is a French-led initiative called "four per 1,000." The proposal aims to increase the amount of carbon in the soil of crop- and rangelands by 0.4 percent per year through a variety of agricultural and forestry practices. These include agroforestry (growing trees and crops together increases carbon retention), no-till agriculture (plowing causes erosion and carbon loss) and keeping farmland covered (bare dirt bleeds carbon). Doing so, the French argue, could completely halt the buildup of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Few experts I spoke to think the impact would be quite that grand; Pete Smith, for example, estimates that soil could, at the most, store just 13 percent of annual carbon-dioxide emissions at current levels. "I appreciate that everyone wants to save the planet," he told me, "but we shouldn't fool ourselves that this is all we need to do." Even so, the four-per-1,000 goal highlights how a relatively small annual increase in soil carbon could, on a large-enough scale, have a substantial impact. Increasing soil carbon could yield other benefits, too: Improvements in soil fertility, water retention and greater crop resilience would help agriculture adapt to a warming world. More soil carbon would also reduce the amount of fertilizer needed, decreasing emissions of the powerful greenhouse gas nitrous oxide, a byproduct of excess nitrogen fertilization. It would be profoundly appropriate if agriculture, whose modern practices have themselves contributed to climate change, could become part of its solution. Farming, responsible for the birth of civilization, could now help save it.

In 2007, at Jeff Creque's behest, John Wick got in touch with Whendee Silver, an ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Letting cows graze on his property had certainly made the land look healthier, he told Silver. But he and Creque wanted to know: Had it put carbon in the ground? And if so, was it possible to measure how much?

Silver was skeptical that she could measure what was likely to amount to very small changes in his land's soil carbon. The endeavor seemed akin to looking for cups of water added to a swimming pool. But she did sketch out a way to arrive at a definitive answer. When Wick offered to underwrite such a study, she warned him that he might not like the results. She wasn't just going to tell him what he wanted to hear. "That's when I knew I had to work with her," Wick recalls.

Silver agreed to the project, which she began that year. Seeking baseline values for the carbon concentrations in the soil, she and her students collected samples from different rangelands in Marin and Sonoma Counties. The samples with the most carbon, it turned out, came from current and former dairy farms. What distinguished these operations, she learned, was that they often sprayed manure onto their pastures; this was done both to fertilize the land and dispose of waste. Apparently, how soil was treated could very much affect its carbon content - a surprise. The larger implication was that people could potentially "grow" soil carbon deliberately.

But how quickly could they do so? Silver found an answer, in part, by looking for nuclear fallout. In the mid-20th century, radioactive carbon isotopes were spewed into the atmosphere as a result of aboveground nuclear tests. Plants around the world absorbed those isotopes during photosynthesis, effectively turning them into a time stamp. Wherever that carbon shows up, it must have arrived there relatively recently. On dairy farms, Silver found the isotopes a full three feet below the surface. This was another surprise. Conventional wisdom holds that it takes perhaps hundreds of years for carbon-rich topsoil to accumulate. On these dairy farms, however, atmospheric carbon had pushed deep into the earth in a matter of decades.

Wick wanted to know if he could deliberately replicate this process on his ranch - but without manure, which, as it decomposes, can release potent greenhouse gases like methane and nitrous oxide. The former traps about 30 times as much heat as carbon dioxide, the latter 300 times as much. As a carbon-farming tool, manure might be self-defeating.

Jeff Creque, a onetime organic farmer, had a suggestion: Why not use compost? Compost can contain manure, but whereas manure alone can release nitrogen as nitrous oxide, the nitrogen in compost becomes locked up in complex molecules. At least in theory, that limits the escape of a powerful greenhouse gas. In 2008, Wick, Silver and Creque spread several semi trucks full of the stuff, purchased from a composting plant near Sacramento, onto Wick's ranch and on another ranch in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. In total, it amounted to about half an inch spread over three acres.

After three years, Wick was disappointed to discover that grazing on its own wasn't leading to carbon sequestration. In fact, the soil lost carbon in untreated control plots. No one knows precisely why, but grasslands throughout California are bleeding carbon. European settlers introduced shallow-rooted annual grasses to the state, which partly displaced deeper-rooted perennial grasses. So carbon put into the ground long ago by deep-rooted grasses may now be seeping out. That's what made the treated plots so remarkable. They had the same history and were exposed to the same conditions, but instead of losing carbon, they absorbed it - at a rate equivalent to nearly 1.5 tons of carbon dioxide per acre per year. That's roughly equal to your car's emissions if you drove from Miami to Seattle.

Silver had thought that the compost would simply break down, releasing its carbon back into the atmosphere or, worse, produce nitrous oxide. But those emissions never occurred; moreover, judging by its chemical signature, most of the carbon moving into the soil came from the air, not the compost. The compost appeared to help the plants draw more carbon from the atmosphere than they otherwise would have.

When it comes to mitigating climate change, soil scientists are most interested in what Silver calls occluded carbon - organic material, often in the form of dead microbes, trapped in clods of dirt. This type of carbon can potentially stay locked away for centuries. (Another carbon type, called labile carbon, continuously cycles among the atmosphere, plants and organisms in the soil.) It was precisely this more durable carbon, Silver discovered, that increased in the treated plots.

Her findings corresponded with a shift in recent decades in scientists' understanding of how soil carbon forms. Previously they emphasized how dead organic material had to physically work its way into the soil. But the newer model stressed the importance of living plants. Their rootlets are constantly dying, depositing carbon underground, where it's less likely to go airborne. And perhaps more important, as plants pull carbon from the air, their roots inject some of it into the soil, feeding microorganisms and fungi called mycorrhiza. An estimated 12,000 miles of hyphae, or fungal filaments, are found beneath every square meter of healthy soil. Some researchers refer to this tangled, living matrix as the "world wood web." Living plants increase soil carbon by directly nourishing soil ecosystems.

In the years that followed, Silver's analyses of soil cores indicated that the treated land kept taking in carbon. Computer simulations suggest that it will continue to do so for decades. It also retained more moisture and grew about 50 percent more grass. One dose of compost ignited what Silver calls a state change: The plants and the soil - and everything that inhabited it - moved toward a new equilibrium in which the soil ecosystem pulled in and retained greater amounts of carbon.

Silver began publishing her findings in scientific journals in 2010. Her second paper, written with her postdoc Marcia DeLonge and the graduate student Rebecca Ryals, offered a remarkable bit of extrapolation. California has about 56 million acres of rangeland, the single largest type of land use in the state. If compost made with manure was applied to just 5 percent of that area, they calculated, it would offset emissions from about 80 percent of the state's agricultural sector - all the cows raised, crops grown, fertilizer applied and tractors driven in California. Much of that offset came from diverting manure from festering lagoons - where it releases methane and nitrous oxide into the atmosphere - into compost, a one-time benefit. But the ongoing drawdown of carbon dioxide from enhanced grass growth could be important, too. If you treated 41 percent of the state's rangeland, Silver told me, carbon pumped into the earth by photosynthesis might render the entire agricultural sector of the world's sixth-largest economy carbon-neutral for years to come.

The soil-improving practices that Wick, Silver and Creque stumbled into have much in common with another movement known as regenerative agriculture. Its guiding principle is not just to farm sustainably - that implies mere maintenance of what might, after all, be a degraded status quo - but to farm in such a way as to improve the land. The movement emphasizes soil health and, specifically, the buildup of soil carbon. This happy coincidence is one reason that carbon-farming advocates repeatedly describe their project as a "win-win." Society could theoretically remove carbon from the atmosphere and store it in the earth, and at the same time enhance the fortunes of farmers and the overall stability of the nation's food supply.

Farmers' obsession with soil health isn't new, of course. It has been a preoccupation for ages. But modern, conventional agriculture has largely relied on synthetic fertilizer to compensate for losses in natural fertility. And while fertilizers help plants grow, some evidence suggests that they can, in excess, accelerate the loss of carbon from the soil. An influx of nutrients may feed precisely those microbes that release carbon back into the atmosphere. Plants may also excrete less carbon into the earth when bathed in synthetic fertilizers, causing the ancient relationship among plant roots, soil fungi and microbes - the symbiosis that increases soil carbon - to fray.

In recent years, the United States Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Service, which was founded in response to the Dust Bowl crisis of the 1930s, has promoted the fostering of soil carbon as an important farming practice. But one of the more remarkable aspects of the regenerative-agriculture movement is that it has been driven largely by farmers themselves. Its proponents fret over soil carbon not necessarily because the N.R.C.S. tells them to, or because they worry about the planet's fate. They have discovered that doing so can help their bottom line.

Darin Williams is one such farmer. He lives near Waverly, Kan., with his wife, Nancy, in a tidy, gray-painted house with a stone chimney. A life-size plastic deer sits on his front lawn, run through with arrows; he uses it for target practice to sharpen his hunting skills. He's a big man with a baby face and a mischievous squint. When he drove me around his farm last October in his red "one-tonner" pickup truck, he talked incessantly about soil.

For nearly 20 years, Williams worked as a contractor, building houses in Kansas City. But work dried up after the financial crisis hit in 2007. Williams decided to return to the family farm near Waverly, an area of gently rolling plains, and give farming a try. His family had farmed some when he was a teenager before leasing the land to tenants for years, and he knew it was difficult to make ends meet. But he was inspired by an article about a North Dakota rancher and farmer named Gabe Brown, who claimed to have developed, through trial and error, a more efficient and cost-effective way to farm.

The gist of Brown's argument was that if you focus on the health of the soil and not on yield, eventually you come out ahead, not necessarily because you grow more corn or wheat per acre but because the reduction in spending on fertilizer and other inputs lets you produce each bushel of grain more cheaply. Williams decided to follow Brown's prescription. "If after three years, I'm bankrupt, I'll admit it was a bad joke," Williams remembers thinking.

Seven years later, his gamble seems to have paid off. He started with 60 acres, now farms about 2,000 and, when I visited last fall, had just purchased an additional 200. In one of his fields, we walked down a lane he had mowed through his warm-weather cover crops - plants grown not to be harvested, but to enrich the soil - which towered over us, reaching perhaps eight feet. They included sorghum, a canelike grass with red-tinted tassels spilling from the tops, mung beans and green-topped daikon radishes low to the ground. Each plant was meant to benefit the earth in a different way. The long radishes broke it up and drew nutrients toward the surface; tall grasses like sorghum produced numerous fine rootlets, adding organic material to the land; legumes harbored bacteria that put nitrogen into the soil. His 120-strong herd of British white cattle - he introduced livestock in 2013 - would eventually eat through the field, turning the plants into cow patties and enriching the soil further. Then he would plant his cash crops. "Had I not found this way to farm," he told me, "we would not be farming."

A mat of dead vegetation - from cover crops, cash-crop residue and dung - covered Williams's fields. The mulch, along with his cover crops, inhibited weeds from becoming established, a major concern for conventional farmers, because so many weeds have evolved resistance to herbicides. "I don't lie awake at night wondering how I'm going to kill weeds," Williams said.

Williams doesn't till his fields. By minimizing soil disturbance, no-till farming prevents erosion, helps retain moisture and leaves the soil ecosystem - worms, fungi, roots and more - mostly intact. At one of his soybean fields, Williams showed me how this translated to soil with "structure." "See how that crumbles into a cottage-cheese look?" he said, massaging a fistful of earth. Small clods fell through his fingers. "That's what you want." Worm holes riddled the dirt, giving it a spongelike quality that was critical, he said, for absorbing rain and preventing runoff. Weather patterns seemed to be changing, he noted. Rain used to arrive in numerous light storms. Now fewer storms came, but they were more intense. "We have to be able to capture rain and store it," he said.

By focusing on soil health, Williams says he has reduced his use of herbicides by 75 percent and fertilizers by 45 percent. He doesn't use pesticides - he relies instead on beneficial insects for pest control - and he saves money by not buying expensive genetically modified, herbicide-resistant seed. He estimates that he produces a bushel of soybeans for about 20 percent less than his conventionally farming neighbors. Last fall, he claims, his yields ranked among the highest in the county. While doing all this, he has so far raised the amount of soil organic matter, a rough predictor of soil carbon concentrations, from around 2 percent to 3.5 percent in some fields. Gabe Brown, for his part, says he has more than tripled his soil carbon since the 1990s. And an official with the U.S.D.A.'s Agricultural Research Service confirmed to me that the amount of carbon in Brown's soil - what his farming has pulled from the atmosphere - was between two and three times as high as it was in his neighbors' land.

The successes of Brown and Williams suggest that farmers can increase carbon in the soil while actually reducing their overall expenses. This could be vital, because in order for carbon farming to have an impact on the climate, as much land as possible, including both crop- and rangeland, will have to be included in the effort.

Critics of regenerative agriculture say that it can't be adopted broadly and intensively enough to matter - or that if it can, the prices of commodities might be affected unfavorably. Mark Bradford, a professor of soils and ecosystem ecology at Yale, questions what he sees as a quasi-religious belief in the benefits of soil carbon. The recommendation makes sense intuitively, he told me. But the extent to which carbon increases crop yield hasn't been quantified, making it somewhat "faith-based."

William Schlesinger, an emeritus soil scientist at Duke, points out that "regenerative" practices might inadvertently cause emissions to rise elsewhere. If you stop tilling to increase soil carbon, for example, but use more herbicides because you have more weeds, then you probably haven't changed your overall emissions profile, he says. He thinks the climate-mitigation potential of carbon farming has been greatly oversold.

Williams has reduced his herbicide use, not increased it, but Schlesinger's broader point - about the need for a careful overall accounting of greenhouse gases - is important. Williams, Brown and others like them aren't focused on climate change; no one really knows if the carbon they put in the ground more than offsets the methane produced by their cows, for example. What they do demonstrate is that augmenting soil carbon while farming is not only possible, but also beneficial, even in a business sense. And that makes the prospect of rolling out these practices on a larger scale much easier to imagine.

The carbon-farming idea is gathering momentum at a time when national climate policy is backsliding. The Trump administration has reversed various Obama-era regulations meant to combat or adapt to climate change, including the Clean Power Plan, which required power plants to reduce their carbon emissions, and a rule instructing the federal government to consider sea-level rise and other effects of a changing climate when building new roads, bridges and other infrastructure.

In the absence of federal leadership on climate - and as emissions continue to rise globally, shrinking the time available to forestall worst-case outcomes - state and local governments (as well as nonprofits) have begun to look into carbon farming. Last year, Hawaii passed legislation meant to keep it aligned with the Paris agreement, which President Trump has said he will abandon; the state has also created a task force to research carbon farming. The New York state assemblywoman Didi Barrett introduced legislation that would make tax credits available to farmers who increase soil carbon, presumably through methods like those employed by Darin Williams and Gabe Brown. A bill to educate farmers about soil has been proposed in Massachusetts. And in Maryland, legislation focused on soil health passed in 2017. Other carbon-farming projects are in the works in Colorado, Arizona and Montana.

But it is California, already in the vanguard on climate-mitigation efforts, that has led the way on carbon farming. By 2050, the state aims to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions to 20 percent of what they were in 1990. Nearly half its 58 counties have farmers and ranchers at various stages of developing and implementing carbon-farming plans. San Francisco, which already has the largest urban composting program in the country, hopes to become a model carbon-farming metropolis. Cities don't have much room to plant trees or undertake other practices that remove carbon from the atmosphere, says Deborah Raphael, the director of San Francisco's Department of the Environment. But they can certainly produce plenty of compost. "If we can show other cities how doable it is to get green waste out of landfills, we can prove the concept," Raphael told me. "We like to say that San Francisco rehearses the future."

Many of California's carbon-farming efforts owe a debt to Wick, Creque and Silver. In 2008, they founded the Marin Carbon Project, a consortium of ranchers, scientists and land managers. The goal is to develop science-based carbon-farming practices and to help establish the incentives needed to encourage California farmers to adopt them. Silver continues to publish her findings in respected journals. Creque also started a nonprofit, the Carbon Cycle Institute, that assists farmers and ranchers in making carbon-farming plans.

Wick has thrown himself into the policy realm, hiring a lobbyist in Sacramento to push a carbon-farming agenda. (In 2014, he even testified before Congress, outlining the project's discoveries and explaining how compost could increase soil carbon on public lands. He deliberately mentioned "climate" only once.) Educating policymakers matters because, as Torri Estrada, executive director of the Carbon Cycle Institute, points out, carbon-mitigation efforts that focus on agriculture can be much cheaper per ton of carbon avoided than the flashier energy-efficiency and renewable-energy projects that usually get most of the attention. The major obstacle to their implementation, he says, is that government officials don't understand or know about them.

California's Healthy Soils Initiative, which Wick helped shape, explicitly enlists agriculture in the fight against climate change. In principle, that means this carbon farmers can receive money from the state's climate-mitigation funds not just for compost but also for 34 other soil-improving practices already approved by the Natural Resources Conservation Service. That's important because the compost needed to cover just a few acres can cost thousands of dollars. Wick has also tried to tap federal funding. Once N.R.C.S. scientists vet Silver's work, a compost amendment could become the service's 35th recommendation. As a result, farm bill money, which farmers receive to subsidize food production, could help finance carbon farming done according to Wick's protocol - not to fight climate change explicitly (which is now seen as politicized), but to bolster the health of soil (which isn't).

As a carbon-farming tool, compost bears some notable advantages - namely, it works both preventively and correctively. Composting prevents emissions from the starter material - manure, food scraps - that, if allowed to decompose, might emit potent greenhouse gases. (About one-fifth of United States methane emissions comes from food and other organic material decomposing in dumps.) By enhancing plant growth, it also aids in removing carbon from the atmosphere, a corrective process. And because the carbon in nearly all organic material was originally pulled from the atmosphere during photosynthesis, compost that enters the soil represents the storage of carbon removed from the air earlier - the grass eaten by cows that became manure, or the trees that became wood chips - and at a different location. That, too, is corrective.

Calla Rose Ostrander, Wick's right-hand person at the Marin Carbon Project, told me that the project's greater goal is to completely reframe how we think about waste, to see it as more than a nuisance - to recognize it as a resource, a tool that can help us garden our way out of the climate problem. Before the modern era, farmers had no choice but to return human and animal waste to the fields. (Wick is looking into the possibility of composting human waste as well; the end product is called humanure.) In a sense, Wick and Ostrander seek to resurrect these ancient practices and, with the aid of modern science, to close the loop among livestock, plants, air and soil - and between cities and the agricultural land that feeds them.

What seems to most impress experts about the Marin Carbon Project is the quality of Silver's research. Eric Toensmeier, the author of "The Carbon Farming Solution" and a lecturer at Yale, says that the project figured out a new way to increase carbon storage on the semiarid grasslands that cover so much of the world. Jason Weller, the former head of the Natural Resources Conservation Service, told me that "the level of science investment is out of the ordinary, or extraordinary, for a group that is really self-started." Weller added that the agency's scientists still needed to vet the research, which they are in the midst of doing. In late 2016 the agency oversaw the application of compost to different California regions - inland, Southern, Northern - to see if land in various conditions would, like Wick's ranch, suck up atmospheric carbon.

But the group also has critics. "I'm very skeptical of their results and their claims," William Horwath, a soil scientist at the University of California, Davis, told me. He wants to see Silver's experiments replicated. This is the project's major weakness: Its big idea is based almost entirely on extrapolation from a few acres in California. At this point, it's impossible to say whether compost can cause land to become a carbon sponge in all climates and conditions, and for how long treated grassland will continue to take in and retain its carbon.

Cows, a flash point in any discussion about climate change, may also present problems. Ruminants burp methane, and while carbon farming does not require their presence, some argue that merely accepting them on the land undermines the goal of reaching a carbon-neutral or -negative future. Livestock emissions account for almost half the heat-trapping gases associated with agriculture, so an obvious way to reduce emissions is to decrease the number of cows on the planet. Instead of dumping compost on rangeland, says Ian Monroe, a lecturer on energy and climate at Stanford University, why not allow forests cleared for pasture to regrow, and change people's eating habits so they include less meat?

Criticism is directed at compost too. The stuff requires energy to produce; huge machines are required to shred the material and keep it aerated. And it's unclear if compost, like synthetic fertilizer, can cause nitrogen pollution when put on the land, or how much greenhouse gas composting itself generates. (As long as compost mounds are regularly aerated to prevent low-oxygen conditions, composting is thought to produce few emissions.)

Organic material from municipal sources can contain bits of plastic and glass, which no one wants on their fields. Manure might carry seeds of invasive plants. (Silver has seen no evidence of this.) Spreading compost on public rangeland could disrupt plant communities, squeezing out species adapted to conditions of scarcity. And in any carbon-farming scheme, who will monitor and verify that far-flung stretches of land are really absorbing and storing the carbon as they're supposed to?

Horwath considers the amount of compost used in Silver's research - about 10 times the usual application, he estimates - to be unrealistically high for practical use. "It seems an inordinately large amount to apply to any system," he told me. And given what he sees as the many unknowns in Silver's research, that compost would be put to better use on cropland where, he says, scientists know with greater certainty that it could improve water retention and the efficiency of fertilizer.

Then there's the problem of supply. Demand for San Francisco's compost, which mostly goes to vineyards in California's wine country, already outstrips what's available. But Wick thinks more starter material shouldn't be hard to find: Americans throw out between 30 and 40 percent of all the food they buy, sending it to landfills where it rots and generates greenhouse gases. Silver has calculated that there's enough organic waste material in California to treat one-quarter of its rangeland every few decades.

Still, given the energy requirements, the logistical headaches and the cost, skeptics question whether spreading compost across extensive portions of the world's surface - including conflict zones in the Sahel or Central Asia - is really feasible. Even if it is, soils probably can't soak up carbon indefinitely. If they have a saturation point, increases in carbon will eventually stop when that moment is reached. And because soil degradation can cause the release of whatever carbon it holds, treated lands would have to be well cared for in perpetuity.

On a cool autumn day at Wick and Rathmann's ranch house, Wick fielded phone calls while I wandered around the cluttered, semicircular room that served as his office and meeting space. A whiteboard displayed scribbles from a presentation on the carbon cycle. Coils of warmly hued yarn hung from the doorways. They came via a local nonprofit dedicated to climate-friendly ranching practices called Fibershed. And draped over a chair was a T-shirt bearing what might as well have been Wick's battle cry: "seq-C," it read, punny shorthand for "sequester carbon." Under that it read, "Doing it in the dirt."

Down the road, he showed me a composting facility that Creque dreamed up initially. He and Wick hoped it would serve as a self-sustaining prototype. "Anything that has ever been alive can be composted," he told me, surveying the 10-foot-tall piles of chicken droppings and feathers, horse bedding (manure and straw) and shredded trees. A tractor mixed woody refuse with animal waste - to get the composting process started requires the right mix of carbon- and nitrogen-rich materials. (That's why some backyard composters recommend urinating on the pile to kick things off: Urine is rich in nitrogen.)

Across the lot, a hulking machine straddled rows of steaming black compost, turning them with a metal spinner. Compost has to be regularly "fluffed," or aerated, Wick explained, to prevent anaerobic microbes from producing methane and nitrous oxide. The manure piles were acrid, but the compost itself had a rich and pleasant odor, like cigars.

Wick hopes that facilities like this will someday dot the American agricultural landscape. The idea is to manufacture compost close to both its source material and the place where it will be used, obviating the emissions from carting heavy materials over long distances. The plant also embodied Wick's contention that composting can help farm carbon and manage waste at the same time. The challenge of affordably creating millions of tons of compost and applying it to great expanses of land is formidable. But there is a pleasing symmetry to the idea that we could use waste to bring the excess carbon in the atmosphere back to Earth, all while making the world lusher and more bountiful.

When I first got in touch with Wick, in late 2016, he greeted me with a question: "Do you know how the earth's atmosphere was oxygenated?" He was referring to a period 2.3 billion years ago when oxygen, produced by photosynthetic organisms, began building up in the atmosphere, prompting a mass extinction and clearing the way for multicellular life (and, eventually, humans).

"Cyanobacteria?" I guessed.

"Very good," he said. "This might work." Evidently I had passed some sort of scientific literacy test. But his bigger point was that living things - and particularly photosynthetic life - had always been the great engineers of the planet's climate. Now, he believed, we could use that fact to our advantage.

That sort of cosmic thinking about the planet and its history is ultimately what makes Wick's vision so compelling and potentially powerful. The essential insight is one often overlooked when we talk about climate change: The element that threatens to smother civilization is also, in different forms, the fundamental building block of life. To prevent carbon from causing misery and destruction, perhaps we just need to change its location. Perhaps we can find a way to pull it from the air and restore it to the earth.

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intergovernmental panel on climate change

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When John Wick and his wife, Peggy Rathmann, bought their ranch in Marin County, Calif., in 1998, it was mostly because they needed more space. Rathmann is an acclaimed children's book author - "Officer Buckle and Gloria" won a Caldecott Medal in 1996 - and their apartment in San Francisco had become cluttered with her illustrations.

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Can Dirt Save the Earth? - The New York Times

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Can Dirt Save the Earth? - The New York Times

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When John Wick and his wife, Peggy Rathmann, bought their ranch in Marin County, Calif., in 1998, it was mostly because they needed more space. Rathmann is an acclaimed children's book author - "Officer Buckle and Gloria" won a Caldecott Medal in 1996 - and their apartment in San Francisco had become cluttered with her illustrations. They picked out the 540-acre ranch in Nicasio mostly for its large barn, which they planned to remake into a spacious studio. Wick, a former construction foreman - they met when he oversaw a renovation of her bathroom - was eager to tackle the project. He knew the area well, having grown up one town away, in Woodacre, where he had what he describes as a "free-range" childhood: little supervision and lots of biking, rope-swinging and playing in the area's fields and glens.

The couple quickly settled into their bucolic new surroundings. Wick began fixing leaks in the barn. Rathmann loved watching the many animals, including ravens, deer and the occasional gopher, from the large porch. She even trained the resident towhees, small brown birds, to eat seed from her hand. So smitten were they with the wildlife, in fact, that they decided to return their ranch to a wilder state. For nearly a century, this had been dairy country, and the rounded, coastal hills were terraced from decades of grazing. Wick and Rathmann would often come home and find, to their annoyance, cows standing on their porch. The first step they took toward what they imagined would be a more pristine state was to revoke the access enjoyed by the rancher whose cows wandered their property.

Within months of the herd's departure, the landscape began to change. Brush encroached on meadow. Dried-out, uneaten grass hindered new growth. A mysterious disease struck their oak trees. The land seemed to be losing its vitality. "Our vision of wilderness was failing," Wick told me recently. "Our naïve idea was not working out so well."

Wick was especially bothered by the advance of a prickly, yellow-flowered invasive weed called the woolly distaff thistle. He pulled it, mowed it, doused it with herbicides. But the distaff kept moving into what had been pasture. He thought about renting goats to eat the weeds and brush, but they were too expensive. He even considered introducing wild elk, but the bureaucratic hurdles seemed too onerous.

Then Wick and Rathmann met a rangeland ecologist named Jeff Creque. Instead of fighting against what you dislike, Creque suggested, focus on cultivating what you want. Squeeze out weeds by fostering conditions that favor grasses. Creque, who spent 25 years as an organic-pear-and-apple farmer in Northern California before earning a Ph.D. in rangeland ecology, also recommended that they bring back the cows. Grasslands and grazing animals, he pointed out, had evolved together. Unlike trees, grasses don't shed their leaves at the end of the growing season; they depend on animals for defoliation and the recycling of nutrients. The manure and urine from grazing animals fuels healthy growth. If done right, Creque said, grazing could be restorative.

This view ran counter to a lot of conservationist thought, as well as a great deal of evidence. Grazing has been blamed for turning vast swaths of the world into deserts. But from Creque's perspective, how you graze makes all the difference. If the ruminants move like wild buffalo, in dense herds, never staying in one place for too long, the land benefits from the momentary disturbance. If you simply let them loose and then round them up a few months later - often called the "Columbus method" - your land is more likely to end up hard-packed and barren.

Wick was persuaded. He began preparing for the cows' return. He dug wells for water, pounded in steel posts and strung nonbarbed wire. He even bought a molasses lick to supplement the animals' diet of dry thatch. He didn't want medicated livestock excreting drugs that might harm the worms and insects living in his soil - most cows are routinely dewormed - so he tracked down a herd of untreated cows and borrowed them for the summer of 2005.

The cows beat back the encroaching brush. Within weeks of their arrival, new and different kinds of grass began sprouting. Shallow-rooted annuals, which die once they're chewed on, gave way to deep-rooted perennials, which can recover after moderate grazing. By summer's end, the cows, which had arrived shaggy and wild-eyed after a winter spent near the sea, were fat with shiny coats. When Wick returned the herd to its owner that fall, collectively it had gained about 50,000 pounds. Wick needed to take an extra trip with his trailer to cart the cows away. That struck him as remarkable. The land seemed richer than before, the grass lusher. Meadowlarks and other animals were more abundant. Where had that additional truckload of animal flesh come from?

Creque had an answer for him. The carbohydrates that fattened the cows had come from the atmosphere, by way of the grass they ate. Grasses, he liked to say, were like straws sipping carbon from the air, bringing it back to earth. Creque's quiet observation stuck with Wick and Rathmann. It clearly illustrated a concept that Creque had repeatedly tried to explain to them: Carbon, the building block of life, was constantly flowing from atmosphere to plants into animals and then back into the atmosphere. And it hinted at something that Wick and Rathmann had yet to consider: Plants could be deliberately used to pull carbon out of the sky.

Climate change often evokes images of smokestacks, and for good reason: The single largest source of carbon emissions related to human activity is heat and power generation, which accounts for about one-quarter of the carbon we put into the atmosphere. Often overlooked, though, is how we use land, which contributes almost as much. The erosion and degradation of soil caused by plowing, intense grazing and clear-cutting has played a significant role in the atmospheric accumulation of heat-trapping gases. The process is an ancient one. Ice cores from Greenland, which contain air samples trapped thousands of years ago, reveal increases in greenhouse gases that correspond with the rise of farming in Mesopotamia.

Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, agricultural practices and animal husbandry have released an estimated 135 gigatons - 135 billion metric tons - of carbon into the atmosphere, according to Rattan Lal, a soil scientist at Ohio State University. Even at current rates, that's more than a decade's worth of carbon dioxide emissions from all human sources. The world is warming not only because fossil fuels are being burned, but also because soils, forests and wetlands are being ravaged.

In recent years, some scientists have begun to ask whether we can put some of that carbon back into the soil and into living ecosystems, like grasslands and forests. This notion, known as carbon farming, has gained traction as it becomes clear that simply reducing emissions will not sufficiently limit global warming. According to the 2014 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an authority on climate science that operates under the auspices of the United Nations, humankind also needs to remove some of the carbon already in the atmosphere to avoid, say, the collapse of polar glaciers and the inundation of coastal cities worldwide. "We can't just reduce emissions," Keith Paustian, a soil scientist at Colorado State University and an author of an earlier I.P.C.C. report, told me. "It's all hands on deck. Things like soil and land use - everything is important."

Some of the proposed methods to begin this drawdown include scrubbing the air with great air-conditioner-like machines; fertilizing the oceans with iron dust to prompt algal blooms that, when they die, carry captured carbon to the bottom of the sea; capturing and storing the carbon dioxide that results when energy is produced by burning trees and other plants that removed carbon from the atmosphere during their growth; and crushing and spreading certain types of rock, like basalt, that naturally absorb atmospheric carbon. None of these approaches are yet proved or affordable at the scale needed to make a difference. The most obvious hurdle is the additional energy some of them require, which, unless it comes from a free, renewable source, adds more costs.

Plants, however, remove carbon from the atmosphere already, require no additional power and grow essentially free. During photosynthesis they harness the sun's energy to make sugars by combining hydrogen atoms (acquired from water molecules) with carbon atoms (from carbon dioxide), while emitting oxygen as a byproduct. (Lest we forget, the fossil fuels that now power civilization contain carbon removed from the air during photosynthesis millions of years ago.) Every spring, as the Northern Hemisphere greens, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere dips, before rising again the following fall and winter as foliage dies. Some scientists describe this fluctuation as the earth breathing.

Nearly all the carbon that enters the biosphere is captured during photosynthesis, and as it moves through life's web, every organism takes a cut for its own energy needs, releasing carbon dioxide as exhaust. This circular voyage is the short-term carbon cycle. Carbon farming seeks to interfere with this cycle, slowing the release of carbon back into the atmosphere. The practice is often conceptualized and discussed in terms of storing carbon, but really the idea is to change the flow of carbon so that, for a time at least, the carbon leaving a given ecosystem is less than the carbon entering it.

Dozens of land-management practices are thought to achieve this feat. Planting or restoring forests, for one: Trees lock up carbon in woody material. Another is adding biochar, a charcoal made from heated organic material, directly to soil. Or restoring certain wetlands that have an immense capacity to hold carbon. (Coal beds are the fossilized remains of ancient marshes and peatlands.)

More than one-third of earth's ice-free surface is devoted to agriculture, meaning that much of it is already managed intensively. Carbon farming's fundamental conceit is that if we change how we treat this land, we could turn huge areas of the earth's surface into a carbon sponge. Instead of relying solely on technology to remove greenhouse gases from the air, we could harness an ancient and natural process, photosynthesis, to pump carbon into what's called the pedosphere, the thin skin of living soil at the earth's surface. If adopted widely enough, such practices could, in theory, begin to remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, nudging us toward a less perilous climate trajectory than our current one.

In a 2016 paper, Pete Smith, a soil scientist at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, and the influential climate scientist James Hansen argued that land-management practices are one of the few affordable options available today for drawing down carbon. "What's surprising to me is that we've not done it sooner," says Smith, who is also a lead author on a recent U.N. report that explores carbon-dioxide-removal technologies. "This has the potential to make a huge difference." Otherwise, Hansen told me, we're leaving the problem to our grandchildren. "That assumption that somehow young people, and people later this century, are going to figure out how to suck it out of the air - that's a pretty big burden to place on them," he said.

The I.P.C.C. is preparing a special report on climate change and land use, to be finalized in 2019, that will consider in greater detail the potential of sequestering carbon in soil. But for now the biggest international effort to promote carbon farming is a French-led initiative called "four per 1,000." The proposal aims to increase the amount of carbon in the soil of crop- and rangelands by 0.4 percent per year through a variety of agricultural and forestry practices. These include agroforestry (growing trees and crops together increases carbon retention), no-till agriculture (plowing causes erosion and carbon loss) and keeping farmland covered (bare dirt bleeds carbon). Doing so, the French argue, could completely halt the buildup of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Few experts I spoke to think the impact would be quite that grand; Pete Smith, for example, estimates that soil could, at the most, store just 13 percent of annual carbon-dioxide emissions at current levels. "I appreciate that everyone wants to save the planet," he told me, "but we shouldn't fool ourselves that this is all we need to do." Even so, the four-per-1,000 goal highlights how a relatively small annual increase in soil carbon could, on a large-enough scale, have a substantial impact. Increasing soil carbon could yield other benefits, too: Improvements in soil fertility, water retention and greater crop resilience would help agriculture adapt to a warming world. More soil carbon would also reduce the amount of fertilizer needed, decreasing emissions of the powerful greenhouse gas nitrous oxide, a byproduct of excess nitrogen fertilization. It would be profoundly appropriate if agriculture, whose modern practices have themselves contributed to climate change, could become part of its solution. Farming, responsible for the birth of civilization, could now help save it.

In 2007, at Jeff Creque's behest, John Wick got in touch with Whendee Silver, an ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Letting cows graze on his property had certainly made the land look healthier, he told Silver. But he and Creque wanted to know: Had it put carbon in the ground? And if so, was it possible to measure how much?

Silver was skeptical that she could measure what was likely to amount to very small changes in his land's soil carbon. The endeavor seemed akin to looking for cups of water added to a swimming pool. But she did sketch out a way to arrive at a definitive answer. When Wick offered to underwrite such a study, she warned him that he might not like the results. She wasn't just going to tell him what he wanted to hear. "That's when I knew I had to work with her," Wick recalls.

Silver agreed to the project, which she began that year. Seeking baseline values for the carbon concentrations in the soil, she and her students collected samples from different rangelands in Marin and Sonoma Counties. The samples with the most carbon, it turned out, came from current and former dairy farms. What distinguished these operations, she learned, was that they often sprayed manure onto their pastures; this was done both to fertilize the land and dispose of waste. Apparently, how soil was treated could very much affect its carbon content - a surprise. The larger implication was that people could potentially "grow" soil carbon deliberately.

But how quickly could they do so? Silver found an answer, in part, by looking for nuclear fallout. In the mid-20th century, radioactive carbon isotopes were spewed into the atmosphere as a result of aboveground nuclear tests. Plants around the world absorbed those isotopes during photosynthesis, effectively turning them into a time stamp. Wherever that carbon shows up, it must have arrived there relatively recently. On dairy farms, Silver found the isotopes a full three feet below the surface. This was another surprise. Conventional wisdom holds that it takes perhaps hundreds of years for carbon-rich topsoil to accumulate. On these dairy farms, however, atmospheric carbon had pushed deep into the earth in a matter of decades.

Wick wanted to know if he could deliberately replicate this process on his ranch - but without manure, which, as it decomposes, can release potent greenhouse gases like methane and nitrous oxide. The former traps about 30 times as much heat as carbon dioxide, the latter 300 times as much. As a carbon-farming tool, manure might be self-defeating.

Jeff Creque, a onetime organic farmer, had a suggestion: Why not use compost? Compost can contain manure, but whereas manure alone can release nitrogen as nitrous oxide, the nitrogen in compost becomes locked up in complex molecules. At least in theory, that limits the escape of a powerful greenhouse gas. In 2008, Wick, Silver and Creque spread several semi trucks full of the stuff, purchased from a composting plant near Sacramento, onto Wick's ranch and on another ranch in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. In total, it amounted to about half an inch spread over three acres.

After three years, Wick was disappointed to discover that grazing on its own wasn't leading to carbon sequestration. In fact, the soil lost carbon in untreated control plots. No one knows precisely why, but grasslands throughout California are bleeding carbon. European settlers introduced shallow-rooted annual grasses to the state, which partly displaced deeper-rooted perennial grasses. So carbon put into the ground long ago by deep-rooted grasses may now be seeping out. That's what made the treated plots so remarkable. They had the same history and were exposed to the same conditions, but instead of losing carbon, they absorbed it - at a rate equivalent to nearly 1.5 tons of carbon dioxide per acre per year. That's roughly equal to your car's emissions if you drove from Miami to Seattle.

Silver had thought that the compost would simply break down, releasing its carbon back into the atmosphere or, worse, produce nitrous oxide. But those emissions never occurred; moreover, judging by its chemical signature, most of the carbon moving into the soil came from the air, not the compost. The compost appeared to help the plants draw more carbon from the atmosphere than they otherwise would have.

When it comes to mitigating climate change, soil scientists are most interested in what Silver calls occluded carbon - organic material, often in the form of dead microbes, trapped in clods of dirt. This type of carbon can potentially stay locked away for centuries. (Another carbon type, called labile carbon, continuously cycles among the atmosphere, plants and organisms in the soil.) It was precisely this more durable carbon, Silver discovered, that increased in the treated plots.

Her findings corresponded with a shift in recent decades in scientists' understanding of how soil carbon forms. Previously they emphasized how dead organic material had to physically work its way into the soil. But the newer model stressed the importance of living plants. Their rootlets are constantly dying, depositing carbon underground, where it's less likely to go airborne. And perhaps more important, as plants pull carbon from the air, their roots inject some of it into the soil, feeding microorganisms and fungi called mycorrhiza. An estimated 12,000 miles of hyphae, or fungal filaments, are found beneath every square meter of healthy soil. Some researchers refer to this tangled, living matrix as the "world wood web." Living plants increase soil carbon by directly nourishing soil ecosystems.

In the years that followed, Silver's analyses of soil cores indicated that the treated land kept taking in carbon. Computer simulations suggest that it will continue to do so for decades. It also retained more moisture and grew about 50 percent more grass. One dose of compost ignited what Silver calls a state change: The plants and the soil - and everything that inhabited it - moved toward a new equilibrium in which the soil ecosystem pulled in and retained greater amounts of carbon.

Silver began publishing her findings in scientific journals in 2010. Her second paper, written with her postdoc Marcia DeLonge and the graduate student Rebecca Ryals, offered a remarkable bit of extrapolation. California has about 56 million acres of rangeland, the single largest type of land use in the state. If compost made with manure was applied to just 5 percent of that area, they calculated, it would offset emissions from about 80 percent of the state's agricultural sector - all the cows raised, crops grown, fertilizer applied and tractors driven in California. Much of that offset came from diverting manure from festering lagoons - where it releases methane and nitrous oxide into the atmosphere - into compost, a one-time benefit. But the ongoing drawdown of carbon dioxide from enhanced grass growth could be important, too. If you treated 41 percent of the state's rangeland, Silver told me, carbon pumped into the earth by photosynthesis might render the entire agricultural sector of the world's sixth-largest economy carbon-neutral for years to come.

The soil-improving practices that Wick, Silver and Creque stumbled into have much in common with another movement known as regenerative agriculture. Its guiding principle is not just to farm sustainably - that implies mere maintenance of what might, after all, be a degraded status quo - but to farm in such a way as to improve the land. The movement emphasizes soil health and, specifically, the buildup of soil carbon. This happy coincidence is one reason that carbon-farming advocates repeatedly describe their project as a "win-win." Society could theoretically remove carbon from the atmosphere and store it in the earth, and at the same time enhance the fortunes of farmers and the overall stability of the nation's food supply.

Farmers' obsession with soil health isn't new, of course. It has been a preoccupation for ages. But modern, conventional agriculture has largely relied on synthetic fertilizer to compensate for losses in natural fertility. And while fertilizers help plants grow, some evidence suggests that they can, in excess, accelerate the loss of carbon from the soil. An influx of nutrients may feed precisely those microbes that release carbon back into the atmosphere. Plants may also excrete less carbon into the earth when bathed in synthetic fertilizers, causing the ancient relationship among plant roots, soil fungi and microbes - the symbiosis that increases soil carbon - to fray.

In recent years, the United States Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Service, which was founded in response to the Dust Bowl crisis of the 1930s, has promoted the fostering of soil carbon as an important farming practice. But one of the more remarkable aspects of the regenerative-agriculture movement is that it has been driven largely by farmers themselves. Its proponents fret over soil carbon not necessarily because the N.R.C.S. tells them to, or because they worry about the planet's fate. They have discovered that doing so can help their bottom line.

Darin Williams is one such farmer. He lives near Waverly, Kan., with his wife, Nancy, in a tidy, gray-painted house with a stone chimney. A life-size plastic deer sits on his front lawn, run through with arrows; he uses it for target practice to sharpen his hunting skills. He's a big man with a baby face and a mischievous squint. When he drove me around his farm last October in his red "one-tonner" pickup truck, he talked incessantly about soil.

For nearly 20 years, Williams worked as a contractor, building houses in Kansas City. But work dried up after the financial crisis hit in 2007. Williams decided to return to the family farm near Waverly, an area of gently rolling plains, and give farming a try. His family had farmed some when he was a teenager before leasing the land to tenants for years, and he knew it was difficult to make ends meet. But he was inspired by an article about a North Dakota rancher and farmer named Gabe Brown, who claimed to have developed, through trial and error, a more efficient and cost-effective way to farm.

The gist of Brown's argument was that if you focus on the health of the soil and not on yield, eventually you come out ahead, not necessarily because you grow more corn or wheat per acre but because the reduction in spending on fertilizer and other inputs lets you produce each bushel of grain more cheaply. Williams decided to follow Brown's prescription. "If after three years, I'm bankrupt, I'll admit it was a bad joke," Williams remembers thinking.

Seven years later, his gamble seems to have paid off. He started with 60 acres, now farms about 2,000 and, when I visited last fall, had just purchased an additional 200. In one of his fields, we walked down a lane he had mowed through his warm-weather cover crops - plants grown not to be harvested, but to enrich the soil - which towered over us, reaching perhaps eight feet. They included sorghum, a canelike grass with red-tinted tassels spilling from the tops, mung beans and green-topped daikon radishes low to the ground. Each plant was meant to benefit the earth in a different way. The long radishes broke it up and drew nutrients toward the surface; tall grasses like sorghum produced numerous fine rootlets, adding organic material to the land; legumes harbored bacteria that put nitrogen into the soil. His 120-strong herd of British white cattle - he introduced livestock in 2013 - would eventually eat through the field, turning the plants into cow patties and enriching the soil further. Then he would plant his cash crops. "Had I not found this way to farm," he told me, "we would not be farming."

A mat of dead vegetation - from cover crops, cash-crop residue and dung - covered Williams's fields. The mulch, along with his cover crops, inhibited weeds from becoming established, a major concern for conventional farmers, because so many weeds have evolved resistance to herbicides. "I don't lie awake at night wondering how I'm going to kill weeds," Williams said.

Williams doesn't till his fields. By minimizing soil disturbance, no-till farming prevents erosion, helps retain moisture and leaves the soil ecosystem - worms, fungi, roots and more - mostly intact. At one of his soybean fields, Williams showed me how this translated to soil with "structure." "See how that crumbles into a cottage-cheese look?" he said, massaging a fistful of earth. Small clods fell through his fingers. "That's what you want." Worm holes riddled the dirt, giving it a spongelike quality that was critical, he said, for absorbing rain and preventing runoff. Weather patterns seemed to be changing, he noted. Rain used to arrive in numerous light storms. Now fewer storms came, but they were more intense. "We have to be able to capture rain and store it," he said.

By focusing on soil health, Williams says he has reduced his use of herbicides by 75 percent and fertilizers by 45 percent. He doesn't use pesticides - he relies instead on beneficial insects for pest control - and he saves money by not buying expensive genetically modified, herbicide-resistant seed. He estimates that he produces a bushel of soybeans for about 20 percent less than his conventionally farming neighbors. Last fall, he claims, his yields ranked among the highest in the county. While doing all this, he has so far raised the amount of soil organic matter, a rough predictor of soil carbon concentrations, from around 2 percent to 3.5 percent in some fields. Gabe Brown, for his part, says he has more than tripled his soil carbon since the 1990s. And an official with the U.S.D.A.'s Agricultural Research Service confirmed to me that the amount of carbon in Brown's soil - what his farming has pulled from the atmosphere - was between two and three times as high as it was in his neighbors' land.

The successes of Brown and Williams suggest that farmers can increase carbon in the soil while actually reducing their overall expenses. This could be vital, because in order for carbon farming to have an impact on the climate, as much land as possible, including both crop- and rangeland, will have to be included in the effort.

Critics of regenerative agriculture say that it can't be adopted broadly and intensively enough to matter - or that if it can, the prices of commodities might be affected unfavorably. Mark Bradford, a professor of soils and ecosystem ecology at Yale, questions what he sees as a quasi-religious belief in the benefits of soil carbon. The recommendation makes sense intuitively, he told me. But the extent to which carbon increases crop yield hasn't been quantified, making it somewhat "faith-based."

William Schlesinger, an emeritus soil scientist at Duke, points out that "regenerative" practices might inadvertently cause emissions to rise elsewhere. If you stop tilling to increase soil carbon, for example, but use more herbicides because you have more weeds, then you probably haven't changed your overall emissions profile, he says. He thinks the climate-mitigation potential of carbon farming has been greatly oversold.

Williams has reduced his herbicide use, not increased it, but Schlesinger's broader point - about the need for a careful overall accounting of greenhouse gases - is important. Williams, Brown and others like them aren't focused on climate change; no one really knows if the carbon they put in the ground more than offsets the methane produced by their cows, for example. What they do demonstrate is that augmenting soil carbon while farming is not only possible, but also beneficial, even in a business sense. And that makes the prospect of rolling out these practices on a larger scale much easier to imagine.

The carbon-farming idea is gathering momentum at a time when national climate policy is backsliding. The Trump administration has reversed various Obama-era regulations meant to combat or adapt to climate change, including the Clean Power Plan, which required power plants to reduce their carbon emissions, and a rule instructing the federal government to consider sea-level rise and other effects of a changing climate when building new roads, bridges and other infrastructure.

In the absence of federal leadership on climate - and as emissions continue to rise globally, shrinking the time available to forestall worst-case outcomes - state and local governments (as well as nonprofits) have begun to look into carbon farming. Last year, Hawaii passed legislation meant to keep it aligned with the Paris agreement, which President Trump has said he will abandon; the state has also created a task force to research carbon farming. The New York state assemblywoman Didi Barrett introduced legislation that would make tax credits available to farmers who increase soil carbon, presumably through methods like those employed by Darin Williams and Gabe Brown. A bill to educate farmers about soil has been proposed in Massachusetts. And in Maryland, legislation focused on soil health passed in 2017. Other carbon-farming projects are in the works in Colorado, Arizona and Montana.

But it is California, already in the vanguard on climate-mitigation efforts, that has led the way on carbon farming. By 2050, the state aims to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions to 20 percent of what they were in 1990. Nearly half its 58 counties have farmers and ranchers at various stages of developing and implementing carbon-farming plans. San Francisco, which already has the largest urban composting program in the country, hopes to become a model carbon-farming metropolis. Cities don't have much room to plant trees or undertake other practices that remove carbon from the atmosphere, says Deborah Raphael, the director of San Francisco's Department of the Environment. But they can certainly produce plenty of compost. "If we can show other cities how doable it is to get green waste out of landfills, we can prove the concept," Raphael told me. "We like to say that San Francisco rehearses the future."

Many of California's carbon-farming efforts owe a debt to Wick, Creque and Silver. In 2008, they founded the Marin Carbon Project, a consortium of ranchers, scientists and land managers. The goal is to develop science-based carbon-farming practices and to help establish the incentives needed to encourage California farmers to adopt them. Silver continues to publish her findings in respected journals. Creque also started a nonprofit, the Carbon Cycle Institute, that assists farmers and ranchers in making carbon-farming plans.

Wick has thrown himself into the policy realm, hiring a lobbyist in Sacramento to push a carbon-farming agenda. (In 2014, he even testified before Congress, outlining the project's discoveries and explaining how compost could increase soil carbon on public lands. He deliberately mentioned "climate" only once.) Educating policymakers matters because, as Torri Estrada, executive director of the Carbon Cycle Institute, points out, carbon-mitigation efforts that focus on agriculture can be much cheaper per ton of carbon avoided than the flashier energy-efficiency and renewable-energy projects that usually get most of the attention. The major obstacle to their implementation, he says, is that government officials don't understand or know about them.

California's Healthy Soils Initiative, which Wick helped shape, explicitly enlists agriculture in the fight against climate change. In principle, that means this carbon farmers can receive money from the state's climate-mitigation funds not just for compost but also for 34 other soil-improving practices already approved by the Natural Resources Conservation Service. That's important because the compost needed to cover just a few acres can cost thousands of dollars. Wick has also tried to tap federal funding. Once N.R.C.S. scientists vet Silver's work, a compost amendment could become the service's 35th recommendation. As a result, farm bill money, which farmers receive to subsidize food production, could help finance carbon farming done according to Wick's protocol - not to fight climate change explicitly (which is now seen as politicized), but to bolster the health of soil (which isn't).

As a carbon-farming tool, compost bears some notable advantages - namely, it works both preventively and correctively. Composting prevents emissions from the starter material - manure, food scraps - that, if allowed to decompose, might emit potent greenhouse gases. (About one-fifth of United States methane emissions comes from food and other organic material decomposing in dumps.) By enhancing plant growth, it also aids in removing carbon from the atmosphere, a corrective process. And because the carbon in nearly all organic material was originally pulled from the atmosphere during photosynthesis, compost that enters the soil represents the storage of carbon removed from the air earlier - the grass eaten by cows that became manure, or the trees that became wood chips - and at a different location. That, too, is corrective.

Calla Rose Ostrander, Wick's right-hand person at the Marin Carbon Project, told me that the project's greater goal is to completely reframe how we think about waste, to see it as more than a nuisance - to recognize it as a resource, a tool that can help us garden our way out of the climate problem. Before the modern era, farmers had no choice but to return human and animal waste to the fields. (Wick is looking into the possibility of composting human waste as well; the end product is called humanure.) In a sense, Wick and Ostrander seek to resurrect these ancient practices and, with the aid of modern science, to close the loop among livestock, plants, air and soil - and between cities and the agricultural land that feeds them.

What seems to most impress experts about the Marin Carbon Project is the quality of Silver's research. Eric Toensmeier, the author of "The Carbon Farming Solution" and a lecturer at Yale, says that the project figured out a new way to increase carbon storage on the semiarid grasslands that cover so much of the world. Jason Weller, the former head of the Natural Resources Conservation Service, told me that "the level of science investment is out of the ordinary, or extraordinary, for a group that is really self-started." Weller added that the agency's scientists still needed to vet the research, which they are in the midst of doing. In late 2016 the agency oversaw the application of compost to different California regions - inland, Southern, Northern - to see if land in various conditions would, like Wick's ranch, suck up atmospheric carbon.

But the group also has critics. "I'm very skeptical of their results and their claims," William Horwath, a soil scientist at the University of California, Davis, told me. He wants to see Silver's experiments replicated. This is the project's major weakness: Its big idea is based almost entirely on extrapolation from a few acres in California. At this point, it's impossible to say whether compost can cause land to become a carbon sponge in all climates and conditions, and for how long treated grassland will continue to take in and retain its carbon.

Cows, a flash point in any discussion about climate change, may also present problems. Ruminants burp methane, and while carbon farming does not require their presence, some argue that merely accepting them on the land undermines the goal of reaching a carbon-neutral or -negative future. Livestock emissions account for almost half the heat-trapping gases associated with agriculture, so an obvious way to reduce emissions is to decrease the number of cows on the planet. Instead of dumping compost on rangeland, says Ian Monroe, a lecturer on energy and climate at Stanford University, why not allow forests cleared for pasture to regrow, and change people's eating habits so they include less meat?

Criticism is directed at compost too. The stuff requires energy to produce; huge machines are required to shred the material and keep it aerated. And it's unclear if compost, like synthetic fertilizer, can cause nitrogen pollution when put on the land, or how much greenhouse gas composting itself generates. (As long as compost mounds are regularly aerated to prevent low-oxygen conditions, composting is thought to produce few emissions.)

Organic material from municipal sources can contain bits of plastic and glass, which no one wants on their fields. Manure might carry seeds of invasive plants. (Silver has seen no evidence of this.) Spreading compost on public rangeland could disrupt plant communities, squeezing out species adapted to conditions of scarcity. And in any carbon-farming scheme, who will monitor and verify that far-flung stretches of land are really absorbing and storing the carbon as they're supposed to?

Horwath considers the amount of compost used in Silver's research - about 10 times the usual application, he estimates - to be unrealistically high for practical use. "It seems an inordinately large amount to apply to any system," he told me. And given what he sees as the many unknowns in Silver's research, that compost would be put to better use on cropland where, he says, scientists know with greater certainty that it could improve water retention and the efficiency of fertilizer.

Then there's the problem of supply. Demand for San Francisco's compost, which mostly goes to vineyards in California's wine country, already outstrips what's available. But Wick thinks more starter material shouldn't be hard to find: Americans throw out between 30 and 40 percent of all the food they buy, sending it to landfills where it rots and generates greenhouse gases. Silver has calculated that there's enough organic waste material in California to treat one-quarter of its rangeland every few decades.

Still, given the energy requirements, the logistical headaches and the cost, skeptics question whether spreading compost across extensive portions of the world's surface - including conflict zones in the Sahel or Central Asia - is really feasible. Even if it is, soils probably can't soak up carbon indefinitely. If they have a saturation point, increases in carbon will eventually stop when that moment is reached. And because soil degradation can cause the release of whatever carbon it holds, treated lands would have to be well cared for in perpetuity.

On a cool autumn day at Wick and Rathmann's ranch house, Wick fielded phone calls while I wandered around the cluttered, semicircular room that served as his office and meeting space. A whiteboard displayed scribbles from a presentation on the carbon cycle. Coils of warmly hued yarn hung from the doorways. They came via a local nonprofit dedicated to climate-friendly ranching practices called Fibershed. And draped over a chair was a T-shirt bearing what might as well have been Wick's battle cry: "seq-C," it read, punny shorthand for "sequester carbon." Under that it read, "Doing it in the dirt."

Down the road, he showed me a composting facility that Creque dreamed up initially. He and Wick hoped it would serve as a self-sustaining prototype. "Anything that has ever been alive can be composted," he told me, surveying the 10-foot-tall piles of chicken droppings and feathers, horse bedding (manure and straw) and shredded trees. A tractor mixed woody refuse with animal waste - to get the composting process started requires the right mix of carbon- and nitrogen-rich materials. (That's why some backyard composters recommend urinating on the pile to kick things off: Urine is rich in nitrogen.)

Across the lot, a hulking machine straddled rows of steaming black compost, turning them with a metal spinner. Compost has to be regularly "fluffed," or aerated, Wick explained, to prevent anaerobic microbes from producing methane and nitrous oxide. The manure piles were acrid, but the compost itself had a rich and pleasant odor, like cigars.

Wick hopes that facilities like this will someday dot the American agricultural landscape. The idea is to manufacture compost close to both its source material and the place where it will be used, obviating the emissions from carting heavy materials over long distances. The plant also embodied Wick's contention that composting can help farm carbon and manage waste at the same time. The challenge of affordably creating millions of tons of compost and applying it to great expanses of land is formidable. But there is a pleasing symmetry to the idea that we could use waste to bring the excess carbon in the atmosphere back to Earth, all while making the world lusher and more bountiful.

When I first got in touch with Wick, in late 2016, he greeted me with a question: "Do you know how the earth's atmosphere was oxygenated?" He was referring to a period 2.3 billion years ago when oxygen, produced by photosynthetic organisms, began building up in the atmosphere, prompting a mass extinction and clearing the way for multicellular life (and, eventually, humans).

"Cyanobacteria?" I guessed.

"Very good," he said. "This might work." Evidently I had passed some sort of scientific literacy test. But his bigger point was that living things - and particularly photosynthetic life - had always been the great engineers of the planet's climate. Now, he believed, we could use that fact to our advantage.

That sort of cosmic thinking about the planet and its history is ultimately what makes Wick's vision so compelling and potentially powerful. The essential insight is one often overlooked when we talk about climate change: The element that threatens to smother civilization is also, in different forms, the fundamental building block of life. To prevent carbon from causing misery and destruction, perhaps we just need to change its location. Perhaps we can find a way to pull it from the air and restore it to the earth.

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intergovernmental panel on climate change

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When John Wick and his wife, Peggy Rathmann, bought their ranch in Marin County, Calif., in 1998, it was mostly because they needed more space. Rathmann is an acclaimed children's book author - "Officer Buckle and Gloria" won a Caldecott Medal in 1996 - and their apartment in San Francisco had become cluttered with her illustrations.

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In a Warming West, the Rio Grande Is Drying Up - The New York Times

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In a Warming West, the Rio Grande Is Drying Up - The New York Times

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LEMITAR, N.M. - Mario Rosales, who farms 365 acres along the Rio Grande, knows the river is in bad shape this year. It has already dried to a dusty ribbon of sand in some parts, and most of the water that does flow is diverted to irrigate crops, including Mr. Rosales's fields of wheat, oats, alfalfa and New Mexico's beloved chiles.

Because last winter's mountain snowpack was the second-lowest on record, even that irrigation water may run out at the end of July, three months earlier than usual. But Mr. Rosales isn't worried. He is sure that the summer thunderstorms, known here as the monsoon, will come.

"Sooner or later, we'll get the water," he said.

The monsoon rains he is counting on are notoriously unpredictable, however. So he and many of the other farmers who work 62,000 acres along 140 miles of the Rio Grande in central New Mexico may get by - or they may not.

"Nobody's got a whole lot of water," said David Gensler, the hydrologist for the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, whose job is to manage the river water that is delivered to Mr. Rosales and the others through diversion dams, canals and ditches. "If we use it up early in the season and don't get any rain further on, the whole thing's going to crash."

Parts of the state got some much-needed rain this week, which may help Mr. Gensler extend his irrigation water a bit. But whatever happens this spring and summer, the long-term outlook for the river is clouded by climate change.

The Rio Grande is a classic "feast or famine" river, with a dry year or two typically followed by a couple of wet years that allow for recovery. If warming temperatures brought on by greenhouse gas emissions make wet years less wet and dry years even drier, as scientists anticipate, year-to-year recovery will become more difficult.

"The effect of long-term warming is to make it harder to count on snowmelt runoff in wet times," said David S. Gutzler, a climate scientist at the University of New Mexico. "And it makes the dry times much harder than they used to be."

With spring runoff about one-sixth of average and more than 90 percent of New Mexico in severe to exceptional drought, conditions here are extreme. Even in wetter years long stretches of the riverbed eventually dry as water is diverted to farmers, but this year the drying began a couple of months earlier than usual. Some people are concerned that it may dry as far as Albuquerque, 75 miles north.

But the state of the Rio Grande reflects a broader trend in the West, where warming temperatures are reducing snowpack and river flows.

A study last year of the Colorado River, which provides water to 40 million people and is far bigger than the Rio Grande, found that flows from 2000 to 2014 were nearly 20 percent below the 20th century average, with about a third of the reduction attributable to human-caused warming. The study suggested that if climate change continued unabated, human-induced warming could eventually reduce Colorado flows by at least an additional one-third this century.

"Both of these rivers are poster children for what climate change is doing to the Southwest," said Jonathan T. Overpeck, dean of the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan and an author of the Colorado study.

While both the Colorado and the Rio Grande are affected by warming, Dr. Overpeck said, the Rio Grande has also been hurt by declines in winter precipitation. "It's a one-two punch," he said.

Last year, though, was a wet one on the Rio Grande, with a strong snowpack in the winter of 2016-17 that allowed the conservancy district to store water in upstream reservoirs. Using that water now should help Mr. Gensler keep the irrigation taps turned for several months.

"In some ways I'm more concerned about 2019 than 2018," he said. "There's a possibility we're going to drain every drop this year, and go into next year with nothing."

Temperatures in the Southwest increased by nearly two degrees Fahrenheit (one degree Celsius) from 1901 to 2010, and some climate models forecast a total rise of six degrees or more by the end of this century. As elsewhere in the West, warmer temperatures in winter mean that more precipitation falls as rain rather than snow in the San Juan and Sangre de Cristo mountains that feed the Rio Grande.

Dr. Gutzler said spring temperatures have an impact, too, with warmer air causing more snow to turn to vapor and essentially disappear. A longer and warmer growing season also has an effect, Dr. Overpeck said, as plants take up more water, further reducing stream flows.

Running for nearly 1,900 miles, mostly through arid lands, the Rio Grande is one of the longest rivers in the United States. It is also one of the most managed, having been controlled by dams and other structures for most of the last century. But use of the river for irrigation dates back much further: For hundreds of years its water nourished the crops of native Puebloan people and Spanish colonizers.

In a typical year most water in the upper Rio Grande is diverted for irrigation. (Albuquerque, by far the state's largest city, gets its drinking water from groundwater wells and from a project that diverts water from the Colorado River basin through a tunnel under the Continental Divide.)

By law, some Rio Grande water must also be sent further downstream, to a reservoir that serves farmers in southern New Mexico and Texas. That section of the river, which forms the border with Mexico and empties into the Gulf of Mexico, has its own severe problems, and relies on a Mexican tributary for most of its water.

As the river dries, crews from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service spring into action, working to rescue the Rio Grande silvery minnow, a federally protected endangered species that used to thrive along the full length of the river but now is found only in the upper reaches.

Crews have been rescuing the small fish most springs and summers for about 20 years, running nets through pools that remain as the river dries up and delivering the fish to wetter areas upstream.

Normally the crews would start this work in June, said Thomas P. Archdeacon, a Fish and Wildlife biologist who heads the minnow rescue operation. This year, he said, they made their first rescue on April 2 and have moved northward as stretches of the river dried up.

"I look at it as an umbrella species," he said of the minnow. "Because it has these federal protections, it's protecting basically everything along the river." The Rio Grande is still lined with willows, Russian olive and other vegetation along its banks, and together with the irrigated farmland forms a long, narrow oasis amid an otherwise parched brown landscape.

But much of the riverbed itself is as dry as a bone.

Mr. Archdeacon had driven an all-terrain vehicle up the sandy riverbed from the town of San Antonio, reaching a spot about three miles north where the flowing river petered out into damp sand. This was what remained of the water allowed through a dam in San Acacia, about 20 miles to the north, the rest being diverted for irrigation.

Mr. Rosales will be benefiting from that diverted water, and if the monsoon rains come he may well produce a plentiful crop of chiles in late summer and fall for his wife, Linda, to roast and sell at a nearby produce stand.

"We've got a lot of faith," he said. "We've always worked on faith."

Others may not have to hope for rain. Chris Sichler, who farms 650 acres near San Antonio, has wells to pump groundwater onto his fields should the irrigation canals dry up and the rains not materialize. "I'm droughtproof," he said. "When we plant in the spring we don't even take into consideration how much snowpack or surface water there's going to be."

North of Albuquerque, Derrick J. Lente, a member of the Sandia Pueblo, cultivates 150 acres, some of which is pasturage for cows that he raises. Under water laws, farmers in the pueblos would be among the last to lose water.

His ancestors have farmed in this region for hundreds of years, through wet times and dry. But Mr. Lente, who is also a state legislator, recognizes that there is long-term trouble ahead. His father and uncles, who have been farming far longer than him, have seen changes.

"This is the worst they've seen it in their lives," he said. "The times are changing to where it's hotter."

Mr. Lente does not have irrigation wells on his farm, but he has made improvements to conserve water, lining some of his irrigation ditches and replacing another with a tunnel.

"I never built it with the idea we won't ever have water," he said. "I don't want to think of that time, I really don't. We'd have to make some hard decisions."

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In a Warming West, the Rio Grande Is Drying Up

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LEMITAR, N.M. - Mario Rosales, who farms 365 acres along the Rio Grande, knows the river is in bad shape this year. It has already dried to a dusty ribbon of sand in some parts, and most of the water that does flow is diverted to irrigate crops, including Mr. Rosales's fields of wheat, oats, alfalfa and New Mexico's beloved chiles.

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The Rocky Mountains Have A Dust Problem : NPR

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The Rocky Mountains Have A Dust Problem : NPR

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A menace lurks beneath the snow high up in the southern Rocky Mountains: dust. Lots and lots of dust.

This dust speeds up spring water runoff, causing intense melting and streams to peak weeks earlier than usual - which wreaks havoc throughout the alpine ecosystem. Water managers and fire forecasters alike are sounding the alarm about the consequences of less water flowing in streams and reservoirs.

At first glance the dust seems innocuous. How could something so simple undermine water infrastructure, stress wildlife and lengthen the wildfire season all at once?

For most of the winter, dust stays buried under blankets of snow. Then, as the days grow longer and the sun's rays begin to melt the top layers, it begins to show. To see the dust before this happens, you need to dig a snow pit.

In the spring, Jeff Derry can often be found waist-deep in one of these pits, somewhere in the southern Rocky Mountains. Derry, the director of the Center for Snow and Avalanche Studies in Silverton, Colo., pays close attention to the amount of dust that winds up embedded in snow.

Snowpacks - layers of snow that accumulate in regions that are cold for most of the year - in the Colorado River watershed are at record lows. These snow pits are like the rings of a tree: They tell a story. If you dig deep enough, you see the entire winter's timeline through of layers of snow - reminders of each storm that's built the snowpack. When Derry digs pits, he's on a fact-finding mission.

"I'll be curious if you're going to be able to see the dust event we had Feb. 18 and 19," Derry said one day in April, shoveling snow over the edge of a half-formed pit. "It is very subtle."

Derry uses a range of instruments to pull details from the pits, each fine-tuned to measure snow qualities such as temperature, density and reflectivity. But the best way to gauge the magnitude of a dust layer is with the human eye, Derry said.

"It's very qualitative in a sense," he said. "You go out, you look for it, you dig, you see what you see."

In Derry's current cross-sectioned snowpack, about 7 inches down, is a beige-colored band of dust.

This tiny little strip of dust has the potential to upend how water is managed in the West. Eventually, Derry says, this snow will melt and empty into the Colorado River. Its watershed provides water for some 40 million people in the southwest.

When there's no dust on the snow, it's brilliantly white: On a sunny day, this kind of snow can be reflective enough to cause eye damage. Without dirt or dust, the snow melts off slow and steady - like the drumbeat of a drip from a faucet. Dust causes the snow to get darker and absorb more sunlight.

"It melts the snow faster than it would have otherwise," Derry says. "And then it melts down to the next dust layer, and so on and so forth until all the dust layers have combined at the surface of the snowpack greatly reducing the [reflectivity]."

When these dust layers combine, the sun's radiation quickens the pace of runoff, making it all that more difficult to capture and divvy up the precious water.

This quickened runoff makes managing water harder and upsets mountain ecosystems, causing earlier green up of vegetation. And when snow melts earlier, wildfires have more opportunity to spark and take hold.

Most of the dust that's settling in places like the San Juan mountains comes from the desert southwest, from land disturbances like farming, oil and gas drilling, cattle grazing, recreation and residential development on the southern end of the Colorado Plateau.

"It's kind of a slow crisis, a slow disaster," said Rich Reynolds, an emeritus researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey in Denver. "It's not like a hurricane. It's not like an earthquake or a volcano."

In the past 50 years, as the Sun Belt boomed, scientists recorded a dramatic rise in the amount of dust being deposited on snow - which forces fundamental changes in how spring runoff occurs. Reynolds says reversing this trend won't be an easy task.

"There's no one size fits all in terms of mitigation for these kinds of source areas," he said. "Plus, these are large, large areas."

In a 2010 study researcher, scientists found that in heavy dust years, the Colorado River's flow on average peaked three weeks earlier than in years without heavy dust deposition.

The same study also found that earlier melting snow reduces the amount of water that runs to the Colorado River by about 5 percent. That's more water lost than the entire state of Nevada uses from the river in a year.

And then there's climate change.

University of Utah hydrologist McKenzie Skiles recently co-authored a study that examined whether warmer temperatures or dust are greater threats to snowpacks.

"What we found looking at those two in this region, is that it was actually dust that controlled snowmelt timing and magnitude and sort of how fast snow ran out of the mountains, as opposed to temperature," Skiles said. "We didn't see any relationship to temperature at all."

Warming temperatures are more likely to affect and diminish total snow accumulation, causing some snow to come down as rain. But when it comes to runoff, dust is the controlling factor. It's the sun's rays that force snow to melt, not outside air temperature.

While science is beginning to paint a clearer picture of how this phenomenon plays out, Skiles says that there's plenty the field doesn't know about dust.

"We still have some questions on what controls the actual dynamics of the dust events themselves," she said. "We see dust in every year, but there's a high variability between the amount of dust that's deposited each year."

Back in the San Juan mountains, Derry says he's bracing for more dust events this spring. The mountain range has registered five dust events since October. Derry says the San Juans are ground zero for this problem. And because they're a key part of an already overtaxed Colorado River system, he says everyone in the seven U.S. states and in Mexico that depend on the river should be concerned.

"We're located at the headwaters of four major watersheds," Derry says. "And our mountain systems are undergoing change at a fundamental level."

Change that could make the West an increasingly dry - and dusty - place.
This story is part of a project covering the Colorado River, produced by KUNC and supported through a Walton Family Foundation grant. NPR's Emily Sullivan produced this story for digital.

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A menace lurks beneath the snow high up in the southern Rocky Mountains: dust. Lots and lots of dust. This dust speeds up spring water runoff, causing intense melting and streams to peak weeks earlier than usual - which wreaks havoc throughout the alpine ecosystem.

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Federal report: High-tide flooding could happen ‘every other day’ by late this century - The Washington Post

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Federal report: High-tide flooding could happen ‘every other day’ by late this century - The Washington Post

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Left to Louisiana’s Tides, a Village Fights for Time - The New York Times

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Left to Louisiana’s Tides, a Village Fights for Time - The New York Times

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JEAN LAFITTE, La. - From a Cessna flying 4,000 feet above Louisiana's coast, what strikes you first is how much is already lost. Northward from the Gulf, slivers of barrier island give way to the open water of Barataria Bay as it billows toward an inevitable merger with Little Lake, its name now a lie. Ever-widening bayous course through what were once dense wetlands, and a cross-stitch of oil field canals stamp the marsh like Chinese characters.

Saltwater intrusion, the result of subsidence, sea-level rise and erosion, has killed off the live oaks and bald cypress. Stands of roseau cane and native grasses have been reduced to brown pulp by feral hogs, orange-fanged nutria and a voracious aphid-like invader from Asia. A relentless succession of hurricanes and tropical storms - three last season alone - has accelerated the decay. In all, more than 2,000 square miles, an expanse larger than the state of Delaware, have disappeared since 1932.

Out toward the horizon, a fishing village appears on a fingerling of land, tenuously gripping the banks of a bending bayou. It sits defenseless, all but surrounded by encroaching basins of water. Just two miles north is the jagged tip of a fortresslike levee, a primary line of defense for greater New Orleans, whose skyline looms in the distance. Everything south of that 14-foot wall of demarcation, including the gritty little town of Jean Lafitte, has effectively been left to the tides.

Jean Lafitte may be just a pinprick on the map, but it is also a harbinger of an uncertain future. As climate change contributes to rising sea levels, threatening to submerge land from Miami to Bangladesh, the question for Lafitte, as for many coastal areas across the globe, is less whether it will succumb than when - and to what degree scarce public resources should be invested in artificially extending its life.

One sweltering evening last July, almost everyone from around Lafitte gathered near dusk at the bayou's edge to celebrate the expenditure of nearly $4 million of those scarce public resources. There were shrimpers and crabbers, tug captains and roughnecks, teachers and cops. All had come for the ribbon cutting for a grand new seafood pavilion, the latest gambit by the longtime mayor, Timothy P. Kerner, to save the town from drowning.

Free beer sloshed in plastic cups as folks ambled about the cavernous, open-sided shed, sampling shrimp rémoulade and alligator-stuffed mushrooms. Once the politicians had finished flattering one another from the podium, a Cajun band, fronted by a fiddler in a shimmery blue dress, cranked up a rollicking fais-dodo.

Amid the celebration, a fireplug of a man in crisp jeans and a starched white shirt cheek-kissed and bro-hugged his way through the crowd. This was Timmy Kerner's party. In his third decade as mayor, Mr. Kerner had managed to persuade the parish, state and federal governments to pay for his signature showcase at the entry to town.

It might seem counterintuitive to keep building on land that is submerging. But Mr. Kerner did not see it as his job to take a 10,000-foot view. In the years since Hurricane Katrina, he had grown weary of being rebuffed in his quixotic campaign to encircle Lafitte with a tall and impregnable levee. He could rhapsodize all he wanted about preserving his community's authentic way of life. The cost-benefit calculus - more than $1 billion to protect fewer than 7,000 people - always weighed against him.

So he had set out to change it. His strategy was to secure so much public investment for Jean Lafitte that it would eventually become too valuable to abandon. In a decade, he had built a 1,300-seat auditorium, a library, a wetlands museum, a civic center and a baseball park. Jean Lafitte did not have a stop light, but it had a senior center, a medical clinic, an art gallery, a boxing club, a nature trail and a visitor center where animatronic puppets acted out the story of its privateer namesake.

Some of the facilities had been used sparingly, and many at the grand opening questioned whether the seafood pavilion would be much different. To the mayor that was largely beside the point. What mattered was that the structure existed, that its poured concrete and steel beams made Lafitte that much more permanent.

"Do we lose that investment, or do we protect it?" Mr. Kerner asked, barely audible above the din. "I hope people will see that, hey, not only are we fighting hard to exist, but, you know, maybe this place is worth saving."

The sky began to dim over the bayou. "It's such a beautiful place, and it's getting prettier by the day," he said, ticking off his improvement projects. "This is just another step at building the community. It sends a message that we're not going anywhere.

"No matter what, we're not leaving."

Louisiana's "working coast" is dotted with communities that, like Lafitte, may not outlast the people who currently live there: Cocodrie, Delacroix, Dulac, Grand Isle, Isle de Jean Charles, Kraemer, Leeville, Paradis, Pointe-aux-Chenes, Venice.

A fourth of the state's wetlands are already gone, with heavy losses tallied from 2005 to 2008, when the coast was battered in succession by Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Gustav and Ike. In 2011, the federal government retired 35 place names for islands and bays and passes and ponds that had simply ceased to exist.

State planners believe another 2,000 square miles, or even double that, could be overtaken in 50 years as the land sinks, canals widen and sea levels rise because of climate change. Recent studies show that glacial melting is accelerating in Antarctica and Greenland, driving sea level rise on the Gulf Coast.

Although the recession of Louisiana's coast has slowed somewhat this decade, a football field's worth of wetlands still vanishes every 100 minutes, according to the United States Geological Survey. That is one of the highest rates on the planet, accounting for 90 percent of such losses in the continental United States.

The Gulf Restoration Network, a nonprofit conservation group, calculates that there are currently 358,000 people and 116,000 houses in Louisiana census tracts that would be swamped in the surge of a catastrophic hurricane by 2062. The Geological Survey predicts that in 200 years the state's wetlands could be gone altogether.

"It is the largest ecological catastrophe in North America since the Dust Bowl," declared Oliver A. Houck, a professor of environmental law at Tulane University in New Orleans who has written extensively about land loss in the state.

In addition to the effects of climate change, human engineering has contributed broadly to the losses. Since the early 18th century, the construction of levees on the Mississippi and the closing of its distributaries have altered natural hydrology and stifled land-building silt deposits from spring floods. Property owners and government regulators have allowed the degradation of swamp and marshland, first for farming and cypress-logging and then, more insatiably, for oil and natural gas exploration.

Since prospectors first discovered oil in Louisiana 117 years ago, 57,465 wells have been drilled in 10 coastal parishes, according to the state's Department of Natural Resources. Thousands of miles of canals have been dredged through marshes for access. They broaden each year from erosion caused by boat traffic and storm currents, even as their spoil banks block natural water flow. A 50,000-mile thicket of pipelines connects rigs to refineries and tank farms across the state.

After years of laissez-faire regulation, some consequential finger-pointing has begun in the courts, where parish governments and private landowners are for the first time suing energy companies to rebuild their land. To date that burden has fallen mostly on taxpayers, even when the property being repaired is owned by oil and gas interests, an examination of state records shows.

The impact extends far beyond Louisiana's shoreline.

The slender coastal zone, stretching west from Breton Sound across the mouth of the Mississippi to Sabine Pass, contains 37 percent of the estuarine marsh and the largest commercial fishery in the contiguous 48 states. Its ports support 24 percent of the nation's waterborne commerce and a fifth of its oil supply. The coast provides winter habitat for five million migratory waterfowl. Along with man-made levees and flood walls, it is the buffer that keeps the Gulf of Mexico from draining into New Orleans, much of which sits below sea level.

Last year, Louisiana officials acknowledged for the first time that even with a vast restoration program, even with tens of billions of dollars they do not have, they no longer believed they could build land fast enough to offset the losses. Plotted on a map, their projections show 40-mile swaths, encompassing Jean Lafitte and everything below it, splashed in red to denote that, without action, they will disappear within decades. The crisis has become existential, with policymakers confronting choices about which communities they can afford to rescue.

In the starkest illustration, a $43 million federal grant is being used to relocate the nearly 100 residents of Isle de Jean Charles, a narrow spit in lower Terrebonne Parish that has lost 98 percent of its land over 60 years. In a national experiment, the money will be used to buy land and build homes for those willing to move to higher ground on a sugar farm near Houma, about 40 miles north.

To dramatize the state's plight, Gov. John Bel Edwards last year declared the entire coast in "a state of crisis" and successfully lobbied the White House to expedite permits for restoration projects. "The sense of urgency has only magnified," Mr. Edwards said in an interview. "We are literally in a race against time."

Mr. Edwards, a Democrat, insists that his state is "not in full retreat mode," that "the science shows there is a window of opportunity" to sustain portions of the coast. But in a state not known for fiscal oversight, concerns linger about whether good money will be thrown after bad.

"People argue that if you make the investments appropriately it will be fine, and it could be," said Mitch Landrieu, the outgoing mayor of New Orleans. "But nobody really ever has the appetite to have a conversation about cutting off your arms so you can still walk."

The sputter and thrum of boat motors announces the morning along Bayou Barataria well before sunup. Burly men in rubber boots load ice and bait into trawlers moored behind their houses and prepare to push off in the dark.

On a clear day out on the Pen, a four-mile lake that was farmland a century ago, the silhouettes of New Orleans office towers and the Phillips 66 Alliance Refinery are visible to the north and east. Lines of crab traps stretch across the flat water, buoyed with floats painted in their owners' signature colors, like jockeys' silks. Alligator snouts skim the surface of nearby canals, and a boat's approach sends a blue heron flapping into labored flight.

Jean Lafitte, the pirate and smuggler, patrolled nearby waters before helping to defend New Orleans in the War of 1812, earning a pardon in exchange. Many here trace their lineage back to his day or to the 18th century Acadian settlers whose cuisine and dialect still prevail (although the Frenchman might be confused to hear locals call their home G ene Lafitte).

The people of Lafitte have lived off the water for generations - trapping and skinning muskrats and other marsh dwellers, fishing, crabbing, oystering, building and repairing boats, ferrying workers and supplies to offshore rigs. Many accept the irony that the water may eventually destroy the economy it built.

As it is, cheap imports and domestic farming of shrimp and fish have depressed prices and made it all but impossible to turn a profit. The global oil glut has reduced drilling activity on the coast by almost two-thirds since 2014. Recent graduates of Fisher High are as likely to seek careers in a casino or pharmacy as on a Lafitte skiff, the iconic fan-tailed fishing boats designed here.

Jean Lafitte is laid out for six linear miles along a two-lane road that curves around the east bank of the bayou. Newer houses on land subdivided from a 19th-century sugar cane plantation were built atop six-foot mounds to keep the water at bay. Many older structures have been elevated hydraulically and placed on pillars 10 feet or higher, a process that can cost nearly as much as the house is worth. While government programs pick up some of the expense, there is not enough funding, and some homeowners cannot afford their share, which often exceeds $100,000.

Yet many cannot imagine living anywhere else. They complain that the bloodless cost-benefit formulas determining which communities get protection give little weight to the qualities that make Lafitte desirable (the name Lafitte is used to refer to the town and its adjacent unincorporated areas). Children, they point out, still spend barefoot summers tubing and fishing and training bird dogs to leap off docks. And when they graduate from high school, three-fourths will have been together since prekindergarten.

The policymakers "don't place value on anything but the money, not the longevity of these communities, not the culture," said Tracy Kuhns, 64, a longtime resident of the Barataria community across the bayou from Jean Lafitte. "One of the problems in this country is that people don't have any connection to where they live. People really want that. Why would you take it away from people who already have it?"

Ms. Kuhns, the president of Louisiana Bayoukeeper, an advocacy group for water quality and clean fisheries, pointed out that she did not lock her door (which flies open all day as her 17 grandchildren come and go). There have been but two murders in Jean Lafitte in the past 20 years, compared with 3,829 in New Orleans.

At the center of town sits St. Anthony Catholic Church, which sponsors the Blessing of the Fleet Festival when brown shrimp season opens each spring. The first catch fills the freezers of cousins and neighbors before anything left is sold to Nunez Seafood and other dockside wholesalers.

After a long day on the water, some may wet their whistle with $2.75 Budweisers at Mitch Martin's Welcome Inn, where a swamp-pop band plays on Wednesday nights and gray-haired ladies line dance.

The tavern is run by Timothy and Thomas Wiseman, brothers better known as White Boy and Zabo. Almost everybody in Lafitte has a nickname, some more self-explanatory than others: Skinny Boy, Sandbags, Lunch Meat, Pink Cow. When Tom Wiseman, 52, was a child, someone decided he looked like another guy nicknamed Zabo. "Forty years it has followed me now," he said.

The Wisemans find that the absence of levee protection reinforces the sense of Lafitte as a place apart, for better and worse. "We're outside the line, and they don't care about us," Tim Wiseman, 54, said. "It's always been like that."

"Now we just expect water and damage every five years," his brother said. "It's a way of life."

"And you know what? It still does not make us want to leave," Tim said. "Are we economically feasible? Hell no. But this place will survive. If we end up living on rafts, there will be people living here."

Although only two feet above sea level, Lafitte rarely experienced significant damage from hurricanes until 2005. That year, Katrina's 120-mile-per-hour winds stripped roofs off houses; a month later, Rita sent enough water coursing through lower Jefferson Parish to dislodge whitewashed tombs from graveyards. Homeowners in Lafitte found skulls and an artificial hip among the debris. Together, the storms forced the demolition of more than 150 houses.

There would be more of the same with Hurricanes Gustav and Ike in 2008, Tropical Storm Lee in 2011 and Hurricane Isaac in 2012. With only 2,000 residents, the Town of Jean Lafitte racked up $9.3 million in federal flood insurance payments in the eight years after Katrina, according to an analysis by Rui Hui, a researcher at the University of California, Davis. (Statewide, the program has paid out $19.5 billion in claims since 1978, or 30 percent of the national total, including $1 billion for properties that have flooded repeatedly, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.)

"The first time, I sat on the sofa and just watched it come in," remembered Chris Dufrene, 73, whose house flooded three times before he had it elevated eight feet three years ago. "Worst feeling I've ever had. Nothing you can do about it."

Shrimpers and guides had been noticing astonishing changes out on the water for years. Shambles of fishing cabins sat stranded on pilings, more distant from shore each season. Duck blinds had dissolved into muck. Land bridges no longer bridged.

"I've been out here since 1981, and the beaches are eroding, the salt water's intruding and all the islands in Barataria estuary that were protecting the land are washing away," said Troy Schultz, 54, who trawls and crabs with his son, Troy Jr., 28. "Big Island is gone. Cat Island is gone. St. Mary's Island is gone. They were miles long. Now it's so open that every time you get squalls and storms it pulls up the marsh grass."

These days, the main road through Jean Lafitte floods almost any time a gusty storm blows in from the south. A mere sideswipe from Tropical Storm Cindy last June pushed several feet of water into streets and yards. The merciless hurricane season of 2017, with Harvey followed by Irma, Maria and Nate, made clear that the town's days may be numbered.

After Katrina left 1,833 dead in 2005, local, state and federal governments spent more than $20 billion to redesign failed and inadequate levees and pumps for metropolitan New Orleans. Even those improvements may not be sufficient to spare the area's more than 1.3 million residents from another monster storm.

But in Lafitte, only 25 miles south, the hurricane defense system consists mainly of Mr. Kerner and whichever men he can employ to sling tens of thousands of 25-pound sandbags, often for days on end.

The mayor feels the threat viscerally, like many with deep roots here. His family settled in Lafitte in the early 1800s. He married a local girl at 18 (Darla Kerner was 16), and worked as a commercial fisherman, barkeep and tax collector before assuming his place as heir to one of the country's most enduring political dynasties.

Mr. Kerner has been mayor for 26 of his 58 years. With a gap of only eight years in the 1950s, a Kerner has held Lafitte's top office since 1888, when his great-grandfather became justice of the peace. His father, Leo E. Kerner Jr., spearheaded the effort to incorporate Jean Lafitte in 1974 and became its first mayor, serving 17 years.

Leo Kerner had been a welterweight champ in the Navy, and taught his boys how to spar, in politics as in the ring. The current mayor is known in Jefferson Parish, Baton Rouge and Washington as a single-minded scrapper who fights best from a defensive crouch. He can be quick to lose his temper when he feels Lafitte is being disrespected, but is also fast to apologize and hug it out.

"He's like a big teddy bear," said Susan H. Maclay, president of the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority - West, which maintains levees on the west bank of the Mississippi. "It's hard to tell him no when he needs help."

Mr. Kerner, a self-described Kennedy Democrat, has made a career of going hat in hand to Republican administrations. He has little choice, as Jean Lafitte's operating budget hovers around $2 million. Legislative audits show that virtually all of the $27 million amassed by Mr. Kerner for construction since Katrina came from federal, state and parish grants. He has lobbied for scores of millions more for bridge and road improvements.

Paradoxically, perhaps, some of the funding - including about a third of the cost of the seafood pavilion - has come from federal recovery grants that flow south each time the town is bludgeoned by a storm.

As the water creeps closer, Mr. Kerner has increased the value of Jean Lafitte's physical plant sevenfold in a decade. And yet, on his central mission to ensure his town's future, he considers himself a failure.

"When I ran for this office," Mr. Kerner said, "I ran to provide a levee. That was my dream. I guess I haven't done a very good job so far, because we don't have one."

If Lafitte has a chip on its shoulder, it is not without cause.

When the Army Corps of Engineers first mapped out Louisiana's hurricane protection system in the 1970s and 1980s, it drew the footprint just north of Lafitte. The priority was to protect New Orleans, its booming West Bank suburbs and Louisiana's ports (the state has five of the country's 12 largest). Feasibility studies repeatedly concluded that extending the levee to defend Lafitte was "not economically justifiable."

That left Mr. Kerner to devise his own plan, and find a way to pay for it. His concept was to phase in the construction of a chain of 10 linked ring levees, 65 miles in all, that would enclose each populated sector of Lafitte. Cost dictated that the walls of dirt, steel and concrete would be seven-and-a-half feet high at the outset, enough for protection from modest storms but not from a major hurricane. A levee of at least twice that height is typically needed to meet the standard of "100-year protection," meaning it should withstand flooding from a hurricane with a 1 percent chance of occurring in a given year.

For a while, the corps encouraged the mayor to pursue small federal grants to build segments of the system. In 2003, with about $10 million, construction began on the first link, which will eventually contain the town's schools and municipal buildings.

Then came Katrina, producing storm surge that overwhelmed portions of the New Orleans-area levee and flood wall system. In addressing the damage, Congress raised standards for the height and strength of the levees that the Corps of Engineers would build, effectively disqualifying the Lafitte project.

Mr. Kerner also found little support locally, where the regional levee authority with jurisdiction over Lafitte was focused on protecting areas closer to New Orleans. In 2007, David J. Bindewald Sr., then the president of the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority - West, told Mr. Kerner explicitly that there would be no money for his levees.

Instead, he sent Mr. Kerner a letter offering "several thousand un-filled sand bags and sand sufficient to fill the bags" along with "a quantity of shovels."

The furious mayor figured he could do better than that on his own, and persuaded allies in the Legislature to create the Lafitte Area Independent Levee District. Funded by a small property tax, the levee authority pays Mr. Kerner $12,000 a year as its president, on top of his mayoral base salary of $79,538, according to legislative audits.

Mr. Kerner's power play did not instantly change the essential dynamic. In 2009, after Hurricane Gustav, the corps began studying options for a new levee that would span a stretch of the lower coastal zone. Only one of several routes under consideration would have protected Lafitte. But at a levee board meeting in 2011, corps officials announced their determination that none of the proposed alignments could be justified economically.

"What do you suggest we do?" an exasperated Mr. Kerner asked Mark Wingate, the corps engineer managing the project.

Mr. Wingate said he suggested studying nonstructural options, including relocation.

"You're reading my mind," Mr. Kerner responded, "because when I saw that map the first thing I thought was that I wanted to relocate your jawbone." He nodded at Mr. Wingate's two associates. "And your jawbone and your jawbone."

In the parking lot after the meeting, the corps officials stiffened when they saw the pugilistic mayor striding purposefully toward them. But he was only coming to apologize.

Bruised but not defeated, Mr. Kerner thought there might be another way.

Four months after Katrina, the State of Louisiana had created the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority to centralize planning. The authority was tasked with devising a master plan for the coast, which it did for the first time in 2007, and with updating it every five years. Science, not politics, was to control its deliberations about the most cost-effective ways to protect people and property.

The ambitious 2012 update pledged to use "every tool in the toolbox" to improve flood protection "in every community in coastal Louisiana." It proposed a $50 billion buffet of projects - marsh creation, barrier island restoration, oyster shell reefs, river sediment diversions - that it asserted could start to neutralize land loss over the next 23 years and outpace it by year 30. There also would be billions for house elevations and flood walls - including $870 million to build Mr. Kerner's ring levees at full "100-year" height: 16 feet.

Over the past decade, the authority has grabbed money from a bag of sources to undertake 135 projects at a cost to the state of more than $2.4 billion (with another $2 billion budgeted for the next three years). Sixty-five square miles of land have been built or improved, along with 297 miles of levee and 60 miles of barrier islands and berms, according to the authority.

The coast these days is awash in ambitious engineering projects. Near Jean Lafitte, for instance, more than 1,000 acres of marsh have been created in and around Bayou Dupont in an $82 million state-managed project that pumped sand from the Mississippi up to 13 miles away. Where open water stood in 2009, there is now walkable land, thick with saplings and shrubs.

But before money could be appropriated for the Lafitte levees, the master plan's authors adopted far more pessimistic forecasts of the impact of climate change. They effectively doubled their previous 50-year projections for likely sea level rise to more than two feet, the highest rate in the country, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

That made the worst-case scenario in the 2012 master plan the best case for 2017 and led to a startling reversal: Louisiana could slow the submergence of the coast, but not arrest it. Even if the plan was somehow fully funded, and the state succeeded in adding or maintaining 800 square miles of wetlands over 50 years, there would still be a net loss of at least 400 square miles and possibly as many as 3,300.

That recalibration necessarily shifted the state's approach. "Once you accept the diagnosis that much of south Louisiana is going to disappear, you still have to have a strategic retreat," said David Muth, director of the National Wildlife Federation's Gulf Restoration Program. "How do you plan this shrinking of the footprint, which is complicated by socioeconomics and by real questions about how fast sea level will rise and how fast you can build wetlands?"

Torbjörn E. Törnqvist, a Tulane geologist who is an authority on subsidence, warned that decisions about places like Lafitte would be "a piece of cake compared to what's coming - because a little down the line we're going to be talking about communities not of 2,000 people but of much bigger things."

And then there's the matter of where to find the master plan's aspirational $50 billion - twice the entire state budget.

To date, the only dependable financing model has been catastrophe, namely the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. BP and its drilling partners agreed to pay $7.1 billion over 15 years to settle litigation by the state, and the money has been earmarked for coastal restoration. Mark Davis, director of Tulane's Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy, analogizes that to "paying for a gym membership by winning pie-eating contests."

The state and its coastal parishes have been counting on about $176 million a year from federal offshore oil leases under a revenue-sharing law passed in 2006. But steep declines in prices and drilling have lowered those projections.

All told, even under the rosiest circumstances, the $50 billion master plan, which many experts consider inadequate, lacks at least $30 billion in revenue.

"All of us believe our citizens deserve more than probably we can deliver," said Bren Haase, the authority's chief of planning and research.

For its 2017 revision, the authority split its theoretical budget between hopeful restoration efforts, like rebuilding marshes and barrier islands, and defensive risk-reduction projects like raising levees and elevating houses. It re-evaluated proposals with a refined formula that weighed each project's cost against the flood damage it would avert.

The price tag for the Lafitte ring levees had risen to $1.2 billion, equating to more than $170,000 per resident. Despite Mr. Kerner's efforts to rebalance the cost-benefit calculus, the annual savings amounted to less than a tenth of that, placing it near the bottom on the state's list. When the authority published its draft in January last year, the mayor found that his ring levees, his lifeline for Lafitte, had been discarded.

The mayor and his constituents felt betrayed once again. "It just makes all your fears justified," said Ray Griffin, the manager of Cochiara's Marina. "When they make a decision like that they just basically slap you in the face and say bye."

In an ecosystem as multifaceted as the Louisiana coast, the protection of one habitat may pose a mortal threat to another, or at least be perceived that way. Flood control is a zero-sum game. The water has to go somewhere.

So there is natural suspicion in Lafitte about the most audacious engineering proposal in the state master plan, the $1.4 billion Mid-Barataria sediment diversion. The experimental project, which is under design, would carve a gap in the levee on the Mississippi's west bank just southeast of Lafitte. When the river is high, floodgates could be opened to redirect sediment-rich water into adjoining marshland at up to 75,000 cubic feet per second.

This occasional freeing of the river may build land more gradually than the continual pumping of dredged sand. But environmental groups argue that it will do so in a self-sustaining way at comparatively low cost. The state estimates that the diversion will deposit enough sediment over 50 years to fill the Superdome more than 22 times.

"We know we need benefits now," Mr. Haase said, "but if we're not doing anything to fundamentally change the causes of our land loss, then we're perhaps not investing our dollars wisely."

In Lafitte's fishing community, there is deep concern, with some scientific backing, that flushing fresh water into brackish marshes and bays will imbalance the salinity needed to nurture shrimp, oysters and crab. Scientists argue that salinity will change with or without the diversion, but seafood industry groups have threatened to sue if it is built.

"It will completely kill these fishing communities," said Clinton Guidry, a Lafitte resident who once presided over the Louisiana Shrimp Association. "Is that the trade-off you want? If you lose shrimp fishermen for one generation, they're gone forever."

For Tim Kerner, the Mid-Barataria diversion provided a bargaining chip. After his 100-year levees were axed from the master plan, he continued to push for funds to complete the ring system at lower height. The state owed Jean Lafitte, he argued, because the diversion would make the town even more vulnerable.

Things came to a head in January last year when Mr. Kerner made his case, loudly, at a meeting with state officials. Seated nearby was his great benefactor in Baton Rouge, State Senate President John A. Alario Jr., a soft-spoken power broker whose district includes Lafitte.

"You know," Mr. Kerner told Johnny Bradberry, the chairman of the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, "if I was a senator or a state rep from my area sitting at this table, I would be very upset. You have projects all along the coast, and this area, where the Senate president is from, you have nothing but a sediment diversion that nobody really wants."

He reminded the officials of all of the money the state had been spending in Lafitte - the bridges, the civic center, the seafood pavilion. "It's so inconsistent for C.P.R.A. to say we're not worth saving when other government agencies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars," he said. "It's throwing away the investment of tax dollars you already put in this place."

When the final master plan was presented to the Legislature in June, language had been inserted that the state and the Lafitte levee authority would be "focused on securing nearly $308 million" for the lower tidal protection levees and flood walls. The plan also called for spending $200 million in Lafitte over 30 years to elevate 1,237 houses, flood-proof nine businesses and buy out two property owners. (Coastwide, the master plan calls for spending a theoretical $6 billion over 50 years to elevate, improve or buy out 26,200 properties.)

The question now is how quickly money will materialize. Mr. Kerner believes the levees can be completed for considerably less than the $308 million estimate. Regardless, the state has budgeted only $35.5 million for them over the next four years.

"Those 2,000 folks down there would like very much for us to be committed to a $1 billion ring levee," said Mr. Edwards, the governor. "Well, we just can't do that. But we haven't given up on them either."

Prospects seem dim for a federal bailout to shore up Lafitte and the rest of Louisiana's coast. Preserving the state's wetlands is a tough political sell because many Americans do not appreciate the magnitude of their self-interest there. Increasingly, Louisiana faces competition from more populous coastal zones that also are at grave risk, like South Florida, metropolitan New York and the Texas Gulf.

The only other pockets deep enough to fill the financial gap belong to oil and gas. Even in a time of retrenchment, the energy industry remains among Louisiana's most vital employers, revenue generators and civic and political donors. But with drilling in decline and the BP oil spill a fresh memory, Louisianans seem newly receptive to holding the industry accountable for the consequences of its activities.

In a recent poll of 565 Louisianans by NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune, 72 percent said the oil and gas industry should help pay for coastal restoration along with the government. (Mr. Kerner happens to agree.) Another 18 percent said the industry should bear the cost alone. Only half said they were willing to pay higher taxes to redeem the coast.

In 2013, with the political landscape shifting, the levee authority charged with flood control in New Orleans sued 97 oil and gas companies, presenting a novel claim.

"Everybody understood that the industry was responsible for a significant part of the damage and had placed an increased burden on those responsible for protecting the population from storm surge," said John M. Barry, the New Orleans author who spearheaded the litigation as vice president of the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority - East. "So it seemed clear there would have to be some avenue to get them to accept their liability."

Over the prior 20 years, plaintiffs' lawyers had won judgments and settlements in Louisiana cases demanding the cleanup of oil field contamination. The flood protection authority hired one of them - Gladstone N. Jones III of New Orleans - and constructed arguments evocative of those used 30 years earlier against Big Tobacco: Energy companies had known for decades that they were destroying the marsh but ignored legal and contractual obligations to repair it, at great cost to taxpayers.

There is considerable documentation of advance knowledge. Scientists and conservationists have sounded alarms since the 1920s about the loss of land to oil exploration. Documents uncovered through discovery show that the industry's own studies began making the connection nearly 50 years ago.

In 1972, a report commissioned by oil and gas transmission companies estimated that pipelines decimated up to two square miles of marsh a year and that access canals destroyed at least that much. Seventeen years later, a study of aerial photographs for the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, which represents major producers, concluded that "the direct and indirect effects of canal development tend to be the overwhelming cause of wetland losses." In 2000, a study sponsored in part by the Gas Research Institute estimated that the industry bore responsibility for 36 percent of Louisiana's coastal land loss between 1932 and 1990.

More recent research links the industry to subsidence - the compaction and sinking of sediment. "Rapid subsidence and associated wetland loss were largely induced by extraction of hydrocarbons," concluded a 2005 study of the Mississippi Delta plain by the Geological Survey. It added that the collapse of Louisiana's marsh "appears to be unprecedented and not repeated in the geological record of the past 1,000 years."

And yet, some Louisiana lawmakers, both in Congress and the State Legislature, do not support efforts to regulate what may be the most lasting environmental legacy of fossil fuels: climate-driven sea level rise. Among them is Representative Steve Scalise, the House majority whip, whose district includes Lafitte. Mr. Scalise, a Republican, applauded Mr. Trump's announcement in June that the United States would withdraw from the global Paris accord to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

The state's leadership initially viewed the levee authority lawsuit as a direct assault. The Republican governor at the time, Bobby Jindal, demanded that it be withdrawn and removed Mr. Barry and others on the authority. He orchestrated passage of a law that would have invalidated the litigation had a state judge not declared it unconstitutional.

"It's that old saying - you don't bite the hand that feeds you," said Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser, also a Republican. "I don't say they have no effect, the canals, but I think it's a money grab against an industry that has been very good to Louisiana."

In 2015, a federal judge dismissed the levee authority lawsuit, primarily on grounds that the agency lacked legal standing. That ruling has been upheld on appeal. But the original lawsuit was followed quickly by scores of others, some filed by private landowners and a total of 43 by six different parish governments (the equivalent of counties).

In August, a different federal judge ruled that pipeline companies must repair erosion that had occurred since 1953 along canals on 20,000 acres of privately owned wetlands in Plaquemines Parish. The first of the lawsuits filed by the parishes is scheduled to be heard in state court in Plaquemines in 2019.

The parishes, all represented by the Baton Rouge firm of Talbot, Carmouche & Marcello, claim that oil and gas companies violated state permitting laws in the dredging of canals, as well as regulations requiring production sites to be "cleared, revegetated, detoxified and otherwise restored as near as practicable to their original condition upon termination of operations." The suits seek actual restoration of degraded land in addition to monetary damages.

In 2016, when the governor's office changed parties, Mr. Edwards reversed Mr. Jindal's stance and intervened in support of the parish cases. "Oil and gas is a huge component of our economy, and we want them to be successful," Mr. Edwards said. "But we also want them to act responsibly when they explore for and produce hydrocarbons."

Oil and gas industry leaders acknowledge that their potential exposure is substantial. They warn they will not roll over to trial lawyers who they believe are extorting them for a global settlement.

"We're going to fight every single last issue because we don't believe we've done anything wrong," said Gifford Briggs, vice president of the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association, which represents independent producers and service companies.

Chris John, a former Democratic congressman who presides over the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, said the lawsuits failed to recognize numerous other causes of coastal degradation and would not be settled. He said that "the energy industry has conducted its operations in accordance with government-issued permits and applicable federal, state and local regulations."

Mr. Briggs echoed that defense. "Yes, if you dig a canal or build a slip, is there technically a loss of marsh or land? Sure," he said. "But that's done through permit. That doesn't mean there's any additional liability or responsibility beyond fulfilling the obligations of the permit."

As it is, taxpayers have spent at least $588 million to repair oil-and-gas-related damage in coastal Louisiana, according to an analysis of state records. That accounts for 84 percent of the money spent on more than 200 projects over three decades by the federal Coastal Wetlands, Planning, Protection and Restoration Act. Enacted in 1990, the program is funded by taxes on fishing gear, imported watercraft, boat fuel and motors.

Because petroleum interests own or lease much of the coast, those taxpayer-funded restoration efforts often benefit the very industry that shredded the marsh in the first place. In Terrebonne Parish, for instance, $39 million was spent to repair breaches in a land bridge across north Lake Mechant caused by erosion and oil access canals. Much of the property is owned by Apache Corporation and Louisiana Land and Exploration, both major oil and gas companies, parish records show, and operators have included ConocoPhillips, Texaco and Humble Oil (a precursor of Exxon Mobil).

Jean Lafitte has not yet reached the tipping point when bankers and insurers perceive that the lifetime of their loans and obligations could exceed the lifetime of the town. Indeed, real estate values are relatively high, if only because there is so little to be had.

But there are early signs of an exodus, particularly among younger residents. The population of the area declined by 21 percent between 2000 and 2010, although estimates suggest it has rebounded slightly this decade. Enrollment at the two public schools dropped 27 percent from the peak before Katrina and Rita, but has risen by 10 percent since.

Mr. Kerner believes the declines reflect temporary dislocations. But some, like Buttercup Mancuso, have left for good. She, her husband and three of their children evacuated their rental house in lower Lafitte before it flooded during Hurricane Isaac in 2012. They returned to find mold sprouting two feet up the walls.

The family abandoned their belongings except for their photographs. "Losing everything once was enough for me," Ms. Mancuso, 43, said. "I just couldn't do it again." They moved to the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, and eventually to North Carolina.

Travis Johnson, 70, a retired Army and commercial helicopter pilot who moved to Barataria in 2000, said that at his age he would gladly take a government buyout for his waterfront house.

"I drove out of here during Hurricane Rita with water flowing over the hood of my Jeep," he said. "Should one delay evacuation, it is not possible to escape. I don't want a lot of complications."

But Lafitte's lifers, for the most part, seem resigned to wait things out. The centuries spent fishing and trapping have built a resilient and self-reliant culture. More than 250 years since the Acadians were expelled from Nova Scotia, there remains a deep resistance to another forced exile.

"People that don't understand it say, 'Why don't you just move away?'" said Ms. Kuhns, the Louisiana Bayoukeeper president, who refuses to join her daughter, Ms. Mancuso, on the other side of the levee. "The people who are connected to these communities don't think that way. It's a whole culture that's connected to the earth and the water. You can't replicate it."

And so the men sandbag. Last hurricane season, they stacked them by the thousands in anticipation of Tropical Storm Cindy, then unstacked them when the floodwater receded. They did it again for Hurricane Harvey and once more for Nate.

The mayor supervises up and down the road from his white Ford Expedition, crossing himself as he passes the Catholic church. He pitches in long enough to let his back start aching, then carps that it's because the young guys today don't know how to properly swing and catch.

He remembers each storm as a fight, tallying them as wins and losses. In the old days, they would stack 200,000 sandbags. "It was like being in a war zone," Mr. Kerner said. "We wouldn't go to bed for two or three days at a time."

With sections of two of the ring levees complete, the men got by with only 20,000 sandbags when Nate narrowly missed Lafitte last October. "Each time you just have to be ready and fight it as if it's going to be the worst thing that ever happened," Mr. Kerner said. "And then you may have to do it again a week later."

The mayor has developed a sixth sense for the telltale signs of whether Lafitte will flood. As Cindy moved in last June, he watched the tide rising near the Goose Bayou bridge: "That water won't quit," he cursed. "Look at the whitecaps. That's what I don't want to see." Soon the water was lapping at his tailpipe.

Four months later, on the night Nate landed near Biloxi, Miss., he divined better news from the bayou's outward flow, indicating that the leading edge had curled in harmlessly from the north. "That's it," he said. "It's over."

As he drove home, eyelids drooping, Mr. Kerner could not help feeling annoyed that the town had expended so much effort for no reason. Then he remembered that no one had been hurt, no one had been washed out of his or her home or stranded in distress. "Such a relief," he thought.

He eased into bed, bone-weary and sore, like an aging boxer, and lost himself in reveries of shiny new buildings and 16-foot levees - whatever might spare Jean Lafitte from the water, for now.

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Left to Louisiana's Tides, a Village Fights for Time

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JEAN LAFITTE, La. - From a Cessna flying 4,000 feet above Louisiana's coast, what strikes you first is how much is already lost. Northward from the Gulf, slivers of barrier island give way to the open water of Barataria Bay as it billows toward an inevitable merger with Little Lake, its name now a lie.

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‘I’m Just More Afraid of Climate Change Than I Am of Prison’ - The New York Times

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‘I’m Just More Afraid of Climate Change Than I Am of Prison’ - The New York Times

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On Oct. 11, 2016, Michael Foster and two companions rose before dawn, left their budget hotel in Grand Forks, N.D., and drove a white rental sedan toward the Canadian border, diligently minding the speed limit. The day was cold and overcast, and Foster, his diminutive frame wrapped in a down jacket, had prepared for a morning outdoors. As the driver, Sam Jessup, followed a succession of laser-straight farm roads through the sugar-beet fields, and a documentary filmmaker, Deia Schlosberg, recorded events from the back seat, Foster sat hunched in the passenger seat, mentally rehearsing his plan.

When Jessup pulled over next to a windbreak of cottonwood trees, Foster felt the seconds stretch and slow. For months, he'd imagined his next actions: He would get out of the car, put on a hard hat and safety vest, retrieve a pair of bolt cutters from the trunk and walk to the fenced enclosure about 100 feet away. He would snip the padlock that secured the gate and approach the blunt length of vertical pipe in the center of the enclosure - the stem of a shut-off valve for the 2,700-mile-long Keystone Pipeline, which carries crude oil from the tar sands of Alberta to refineries on the Texas coast. He would cut the chain on the steel wheel attached to the stem, and turn the wheel clockwise until it stopped.

What Foster didn't expect was that once he'd broken through the chain-link fence, he would be briefly overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he was about to do. He faced away from the biting wind, and allowed himself to cry. He then put a gloved hand on the steel wheel, which was almost three feet across and mounted vertically as if on the helm of a ship, and began to turn it. For long minutes it spun easily, but then both the wheel and the ground below his feet began to shake. Foster had been told to expect this, but still he hesitated. When he resumed turning, he had to throw his body into the task, at times dangling from the wheel to coax it downward. Finally, he could wrestle it no farther, and the shaking stopped. He felt a profound sense of relief. He replaced the lock on the wheel with a new padlock, sat down and, breathing heavily, began to record himself on his phone. "Hey, I've never shot video for grandkids that I don't have yet," he told the camera, "but I want any grandkids, or grandnephews and nieces or whatever, anybody in any family tree of mine, to know that once upon a time people burned oil, and they put it in these underground pipes, and they burned enough, fast enough, to almost cook you guys out of existence, and we had to stop it - any way we could think of."

Ten minutes before Foster entered the enclosure, Jessup and another supporter each called the operations center of the pipeline's owner, the TransCanada Corporation, and described what Foster was about to do. The company called the sheriff. About half an hour after Foster walked away from the valve station, an officer arrived and arrested Foster, Jessup and Schlosberg.

What neither the sheriff's department nor TransCanada knew, however, was that while Foster was closing off the Keystone Pipeline, four other cross-border pipelines - in Washington, Montana and Minnesota - were being shut down, too. Together, the pipelines carry nearly 70 percent of the crude oil imported to the United States from Canada.

Foster, who is 53, was charged with criminal trespass and criminal mischief, conspiracy to commit criminal mischief and reckless endangerment. At his bond hearing in Cavalier, N.D., he learned that he faced a maximum sentence of more than 26 years. When prosecutors requested that his bail be set at $100,000, Foster asked for a chance to speak. "Your Honor," he said, "one of the main reasons for this action is to appear here and see justice done for our children, and to protect the air and land and water that they will require to survive. So it's very important for me to be here in this courtroom, and I wouldn't miss it for the world. I'm - it's terrifying - but I am not going to miss it."

Judge Laurie Fontaine set his bail at $75,000.

I first met Foster on a pitch-black evening in November 2016, a week after the presidential election, in the community room of a progressive church in Hood River, Ore. Foster and the four others accused of pipeline sabotage, all of whom had been released on bail, had been dubbed the Valve Turners, and this was their first public appearance since their coordinated action. They stood in a self-conscious line before their audience, unsure how to begin.

One by one, they recounted their actions on the morning of Oct. 11. Ken Ward, 61, a longtime environmental activist from New England, closed a shut-off valve on Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain pipeline near Mount Vernon, Wash. Leonard Higgins, 66, a soft-spoken Unitarian and retired state-government employee from Corvallis, Ore., closed a shut-off valve on the Enbridge Express Pipeline near Coal Banks Landing, Mont. Emily Johnston, 51, an editor and a poet, and Annette Klapstein, 65, a retired attorney for the Puyallup tribe, traveled together from Seattle to Leonard, Minn., and turned the shut-off valves on a pair of pipelines owned by Enbridge. The five men and women said little about themselves, dwelling instead on what they saw as the existential threat of climate change and the inadequacy of available legal remedies. "I'm not courageous or brave," Johnston told the small crowd. "I'm just more afraid of climate change than I am of prison."

Foster, dressed in what I would learn was his standard outfit - Hawaiian shirt, jeans and running shoes - stood at one end of the row, bouncing on his toes. Slight and agile, he can seem much younger than his years, almost impish. "I'm not afraid," he said, grinning.

His companions laughed tolerantly; they had heard this before. "Well, that's good, because you've got the biggest charges," Johnston teased.

The Valve Turners are, for the most part, quiet people. They wear sensible shoes, and several attend church regularly. Most are parents, and one is a grandparent. All are white, all are college-educated and none are truly poor. While all are deeply concerned about climate change, none are immediately threatened by its worst effects: no one's home has flooded, and no one's health has been seriously damaged by heat waves or failed harvests or northward-creeping tropical diseases. All say that it is this relative safety - and the relative advantages of age, race, education and wealth - that makes them feel they have a particular responsibility, as climate activists, to push the boundaries of civil disobedience.

Most Americans treat climate change, as the saying goes, seriously but not literally. We accept the science, we worry about its forecasts. We tell ourselves that the effects won't be as bad as predicted, or that they will happen elsewhere, a long time from now. We tell ourselves that someone else will get serious about fixing the problem very soon. We find some way to blur the causal line between our individual actions and their cumulative effects. This is, in many ways, an eminently reasonable reaction, because it allows us to continue with our daily lives and to tend to the political emergencies of the moment - which are, after all, always numerous.

The Valve Turners take climate change both very seriously and very literally. They are among those whom Ward calls the "climate freakout people" - the scant 2 to 3 percent of Americans who, when asked by Gallup to name the most important problem facing the country today, mention pollution or the environment. They can quote from the work of scientists like James Hansen, the former director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, who was an author of a 2008 paper concluding that in order to preserve a planet "similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted," the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere needs to be reduced to 350 parts per million or less. (They can also tell you that the current atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, which was about 385 parts per million when Hansen and his team published their paper, is now above 407 - higher than it has been in at least 800,000 years.) For a variety of reasons, they have found themselves unable to look away from the scientific consensus that global business as usual is likely to cause, and may well already be causing, unspeakable suffering. With what their admirers call moral clarity and their detractors - including some of their loved ones - call tunnel vision, they've decided that their own business as usual must end.

Foster may have made up his mind as early as high school, when he starred in a production of "The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail," the 1970 play about Thoreau's refusal to pay a poll tax because of his opposition to the Mexican-American War. "It's very simple," the play's Thoreau tells the local constable. "What the government of this country is doing turns my stomach! And if I keep my mouth shut, I'm a criminal. To my Conscience. To my God. To Society. And to you, Sam Staples."

The modern environmental movement was born around the time Thoreau adjourned to his cabin on Walden Pond in 1845, but the climate movement - the part of the environmental movement concerned primarily with reducing greenhouse-gas emissions and easing the effects of climate change - is barely 10 years old.

For decades, the predictions of climate scientists inspired little citizen action: In North America, at least, the possible consequences of climate change were too abstract, too distant in time and space, to galvanize a popular movement. But as international negotiations kept stalling, proposed legislation repeatedly staggered toward failure and scientific forecasts worsened, frustration grew among grass-roots environmentalists. In 2008, seven Middlebury College graduates and a Middlebury scholar in residence, Bill McKibben - whose 1989 book, "The End of Nature," was among the first to take on climate change for a mass audience - founded the advocacy group 350.org, named after the study led by James Hansen. The work of McKibben and his students helped define the goal of the nascent climate movement: reducing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million or less. In the process, they also defined their opponents. Those who were adding the most carbon dioxide to the atmosphere were the movement's biggest enemies, and at the head of that list was the fossil-fuel industry.

Climate-movement leaders organized mass demonstrations - in front of the White House, at international climate conferences and elsewhere - but almost from the start, a handful of activists began executing smaller-scale, more confrontational actions, hoping to both rouse complacent sympathizers and shame major emitters. In Utah in 2008, an economics student named Tim DeChristopher, who had grown alarmed about the increasing likelihood of climate scientists' worst-case scenarios, posed as a bidder at an auction for public-lands drilling rights, placing fraudulent bids for leases on 22,500 acres of land. DeChristopher was convicted of two felonies, sentenced to two years in jail and fined $10,000.

Like DeChristopher, Ken Ward, a former deputy director and chief operating officer of Greenpeace U.S.A., had become convinced that such actions were essential provocations. "This is the kind of disruption that's necessary to change politics," he says.

Nearly six feet tall, Ward has craggy features, thick, dark eyebrows and a professorial air belied by his customary sturdy workwear. In the fall of 2012, he and other activists paid a series of surreptitious visits to Brayton Point, a port on the southeastern fringe of Massachusetts and the home of an aging coal-fired power plant that was, at the time, the state's largest carbon-dioxide emitter. Posing as bird-watchers, they surveyed the harbor with binoculars.

On May 15, 2013, Ward and a young Quaker sailmaker named Jay O'Hara piloted a 32-foot lobster boat into the Brayton Point ship channel, dropping anchor in the path of a freighter carrying a load of West Virginia coal to the power station. When the freighter neared, Ward and O'Hara alerted the police and the ship's crew that they were carrying out a peaceful protest. ("This coal is coming from the United States," a crew member responded. "What's the problem with that?") It took the rest of the day to move the boat, which Ward and O'Hara had named the Henry David T. The pair were charged with three misdemeanors and a felony.

But on the morning the trial was scheduled to begin, the district attorney, Sam Sutter, announced that he had decided not to pursue criminal charges. "Climate change is one of the gravest crises our planet has ever faced," he told reporters gathered in the courthouse plaza. Sutter added that he would join a climate march later that month. (That year, Sutter ran for mayor of the working-class city of Fall River, Mass., and won.) By then, the owners of the Brayton Point station had decided to close it, citing low energy prices and the costs of retrofitting the facility to meet current environmental standards.

Ward moved from Boston to a small town outside Portland, Ore., and began thinking about how he might continue what he and O'Hara started. Quietly, he began to discuss possibilities with core members of the climate movement in Seattle - conversations that would eventually include Michael Foster.

Foster, a family therapist, longtime environmentalist and father of two, had been living in Seattle for two decades, and he'd recently become active in raising awareness about climate change. But his road to the beet fields of North Dakota began years earlier near Houston, now the southernmost endpoint of the Keystone Pipeline.

When Foster was 3, his father was shot and killed on the street in Laredo, Tex. His mother, who left the family a few months earlier, lost custody of her three children to Foster's paternal grandparents. Foster and his siblings were raised in a Houston suburb, Deer Park; his mother remarried, moved to central Texas and maintained an affectionate but somewhat distant relationship with her children. (Not until Foster was in his 20s did she reveal her suspicion that his father, a junior-college professor, had been having an affair with a female student and was shot by a rival.)

Despite the upheaval of his early years, Foster remembers his childhood as a happy one. His paternal grandfather worked for the Shell oil refinery whose smokestacks still punctuate the Houston skyline, and his grandparents were able to raise Foster and his siblings in relative comfort.

Foster's grandmother died of cancer when he was in eighth grade, and he responded to the loss, in part, with a tent-revival religious conversion, becoming a Baptist. Foster believed that his future lay in the ministry, and he eagerly anticipated the return of the traveling preacher who had drawn him into the church. But as he sat with other believers in his high school auditorium, watching his mentor prowl the same stage where Foster had pretended to be Thoreau, he saw only artifice. "He was promoting his television show, he was asking for money," Foster says. "I'd learned something about performance, and I could see this was a performance." He walked out of the auditorium, and out of the church, with a lifelong horror of hypocrisy.

Foster first encountered the notion of climate change when his high school debate team was assigned to research energy independence. In Texas in the 1970s, support for increased domestic oil production was practically a requirement for residency, but the team had to argue both sides of the issue, so they studied the prospects for energy sources at home and abroad. One day, an upperclassman gave Foster an interesting tip: At Exxon, where some students' parents worked, company scientists had considered the effects of carbon-dioxide emissions on the climate and concluded that humanity would soon have to wean itself off fossil fuels.

"It was just this goofy, weird piece of information," Foster remembers. "We couldn't even figure out how to use it - was it an argument for energy independence, or against it?" In 2015, when news broke that Exxon scientists had indeed studied the causes and effects of climate change for decades, Foster would remember how he and his fellow debaters failed to understand that the industry on which their families depended might also be upending their world.

Foster studied theater at the University of Houston and found work performing Shakespeare in local schools. Theater led him to Louisville, Ky., where he returned to school for a degree in counseling, hoping to channel his love for children and the outdoors into a career as a wilderness therapist. After graduation he moved to the Pacific Northwest, where he worked for a succession of outdoor education programs. He also reconnected with his college girlfriend, who was working in Seattle, and in 1999, they married.

They soon had two children. Foster took enthusiastically to fatherhood; the violent death of his own father had given him an early lesson in the uncertainty of life, and he delighted in providing his family with the sense of security he had lost. "My friends started complaining that I wouldn't spend time with them because I insisted on being home for bedtime," he says. "I was just so happy - ridiculously happy."

But Foster was increasingly troubled by one particular threat to his family. In high school, he regarded the heating of the planet by humans as a goofy rumor, but he'd since come to see it as a credible, even pressing, concern. During the summer of 1988, when he was 23, he turned on the television just as Hansen was testifying before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on global warming. "It is already happening now," Hansen said at the hearing.

That's it, Foster remembers thinking. Now Congress knows. Now it's going to be fixed.

It wasn't fixed, of course. Through the 2000s, Foster worked as a therapist and an outdoor educator, finding solace in the connections he forged between kids and the rest of the living world. But he knew that the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere was increasing, and he knew that its heaviest consequences - more extreme droughts, floods, fires and storms - would be borne by his children's generation and those that came after it.

He felt compelled to do more, and in the summer of 2012, at the suggestion of a friend, he traveled to San Francisco for climate-change activism training run by Al Gore. When he returned home, he adapted Gore's famous PowerPoint presentation for younger audiences, adding stories about kids who planted trees, built their own wind turbines and sued the United States government over its inaction on climate change.

Soon Foster was talking about climate change to hundreds of students every month. He worked with a group of kids who were suing the state of Washington over its climate policy. In 2013, he and Emily Johnston helped found 350Seattle.org, which became part of an intensifying campaign against the expansion of fossil-fuel infrastructure in the Pacific Northwest, successfully opposing the construction of several new coal and oil export terminals in Washington and Oregon. In May and June 2015 in Seattle, Foster, Johnston and hundreds of other activists tried to prevent the departure of Royal Dutch Shell's offshore oil rig, the Polar Pioneer, by forming chains of kayaks and canoes; the following month, Foster joined another boat blockade, in Portland, that tried to stop a Shell icebreaker from leaving for the Arctic. Though both vessels eventually proceeded north, Shell officials were reportedly surprised by the strength of the opposition and the coverage it garnered. In September, citing the disappointing results of its exploration, the company abandoned its Arctic drilling operations. For Foster, it was a revelation: He had put his body in the way of the polluters, and the polluters had turned back.

In the late summer of 2016, an acquaintance invited Foster to a meeting with Ward and a small group of other activists but warned Foster that his very attendance could make him an accessory to a felony. Foster didn't hesitate. "How lovely!" he remembers saying. "I've been waiting!"

On Oct. 9, 2016, Ward left for northwestern Washington, Higgins for Montana, Klapstein and Johnston for Minnesota and Foster for North Dakota. They agreed that their actions would be nonviolent and that they would willingly accept the consequences in court. All five have faced or are facing trials in the states where their actions took place, and in each, they have sought to use the "necessity defense" - to argue that they broke the law because they had exhausted all legal means to reduce or eliminate a clear and present danger, namely the threat of climate change. The necessity defense, traditionally applied to crimes committed to head off immediate physical threats, has been permitted only rarely in civil-disobedience cases, and it has almost never succeeded. But for the Valve Turners, its articulation is a deliberate extension of their campaign, a way to publicly express the urgency they feel. "It's both practical and political," says Lauren Regan, the executive director of the Civil Liberties Defense Center in Eugene, Ore., and the lead attorney in Ward's case. "Talking about this as a necessity - that really pushes the conversation in a direction the movement wants it to go."

The Valve Turners see their actions as complementary to the rest of the climate movement, as adding an offense to a movement that has so far played mostly defense - as it did during the mass protests against the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016 and early 2017, which were led by the Standing Rock Sioux and other tribes. Foster says: "I'd participated in all these different protests, but how much of the poison had I actually stopped? That I had a chance to take a major action against the existing flow - God, finally."

But the Valve Turners' tactics are not popular within the environmental movement as a whole and remain controversial even within the climate movement. While the national leadership of 350.org offered its support to the Valve Turners after their arrests, the response from mainstream environmental groups was subdued; for some, the shut-offs were reminiscent of the anonymous vandalism carried out by groups like Earth First! and the Earth Liberation Front beginning in the 1980s, which enabled opponents to demonize environmentalists as domestic terrorists.

DeChristopher, who went on to study divinity at Harvard, has worked with several of the Valve Turners through the New England-based Climate Disobedience Center, which provides strategic support to climate activists practicing civil disobedience. He says their willingness to assume responsibility, and to publicly explain their actions, distinguishes their strategy from that of anonymous saboteurs. "If you do something and then run away, that gives your opponents a huge opportunity to come in and say, 'Let me tell you who these people are and why we should go after them,' " he says. "If you stand your ground and tell your story, that puts a face on it, and it can have an entirely different effect."

This theory was tested when Ward, whose case was the first to go to trial, appeared in court in the small city of Mount Vernon, in far northwestern Washington State, on a cold, bright January morning last year. The judge, Michael Rickert, did not allow Ward to use a necessity defense, ruling that Ward had not exhausted his legal options. Ward was charged with both burglary and sabotage - which, in Washington, is defined in part as willful interference with a commercial enterprise - and as Rickert dryly pointed out, the case was "not exactly a whodunit." The jury even watched a video of Ward cutting the chain that secured the emergency valve of Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain pipeline. But after nearly six hours of sometimes heated deliberation, the jurors announced that they could not come to a decision on either charge. They told me that all were in favor of conviction except for one, who maintained that Ward's primary intent was not to break the law but to make a point about climate change.

The judge declared a mistrial based on the hung jury, and Ward was tried again five months later, in June. This time, he was convicted of burglary, but once again the jurors could not reach a decision on the sabotage charge. The second jury was even more divided than the first: a retired nurse who voted against conviction on the sabotage charge described Ward as a "hero," while the presiding juror, Donald Munro, voted for conviction on both counts, calling Ward a "jerk" who "did it to get attention."

Another juror, Warren Wicke, a former corporate recruiter who retired to Mount Vernon, voted against a sabotage conviction, calling the charge "overkill," and described Ward as a "good man." But like many of the other jurors I interviewed, he has his reservations about Ward's strategy. "I'm worried about somebody trying to outdo him, somebody doing something more outrageous for the sake of publicity," he said.

The maximum penalty for second-degree burglary in Washington is 10 years in prison and a $10,000 fine. After the prosecution decided not to pursue a second retrial on the sabotage charge, Judge Rickert sentenced Ward to two days in prison and 30 days of community service, which Ward, an experienced carpenter, fulfilled this summer by working for the local Habitat for Humanity chapter. "Do I think that Mr. Ward's behavior's going to change if he spends 90 days in jail? No," Rickert said at the sentencing. "Would putting Mr. Ward in jail change the behavior of other people from throwing the tea off the boat or shutting off the oil pipeline? I don't think so."

Most of the Valve Turners say that their acute concern about climate change, and their decision to break the law because of it, have come with significant personal costs. Some have lost friends and partners, and all have found that "climate freakout people" are not popular at parties. Still, most have reached an accommodation with those who don't share their alarm.

Foster has found such accommodations - with himself, with others - nearly impossible. When Foster committed himself to the climate movement, he also recruited his children, then 8 and 10, to march and speak alongside him. His older child, now a cleareyed 16-year-old, says that both siblings were initially happy to participate - in part because it gave them a chance to spend time with their father, whom they saw less and less of as his activism increased. But before long, they felt pressured. "When we would try to refuse, when we would say, 'Hey, I'm tired,' or 'Hey, I have homework,' or 'Hey, I have school today,' it would be: 'Don't you care about the planet? Don't you care about the future?' " the older child explains. "That felt awful, because of course we cared, of course we wanted to do our part. But it felt like he was using our voices to spread his message."

Foster was also determined that his household reduce its own carbon footprint. He tried to talk his family out of a Hawaiian vacation and other travel. He tried to talk them out of buying a Christmas tree and getting a cat. "Everything I do and don't do today, to pollute or stop polluting, changes what lives and dies on the planet for the next 300 years - in a very specific, particular way," he told me. "I can't let myself off the hook."

He couldn't let his family off the hook either, and resentments deepened. "When people asked me how things were going, how I was doing, I'd say, 'He's doing important stuff, and it matters,' " says his ex-wife, Malinda, who asked that her last name and her children's names not be used to protect her family's privacy. "I'd also say, 'I really respect Gandhi, but I wouldn't want to be married to him.' " Both Malinda and her older child say they felt constantly judged, and frustrated, by Foster's inflexibility. In 2014, Malinda filed for divorce, and his children said they no longer wanted to be part of his activism - or part of his life.

Malinda says the emotional scars Foster left are profound. "I think he believes he is doing what's right, and he would be the first to say he's doing this to protect his kids," Malinda told me. "What's tragic is that he's traumatizing his kids' present, and what good is the kids' future without their present?" Things might have been different, Foster's older child added, if he had presented climate change to his kids as something to be aware of, not something to fear. If he had responded to their occasional reluctance with understanding instead of anger. If he had listened. "When I hear someone mention climate change now, I just feel this overwhelming guilt," Foster's older child said. "I think, 27 trees. I've only planted 27 trees. I haven't done enough. I have so much further to go."

After his divorce, Foster, who had already closed up his private therapy practice to focus on climate activism, moved into a room in a house owned by two fellow activists. He now lives on less than $500 a month, usually traveling by bus, train or bicycle. While low-carbon living affords him some peace of mind, he can't entirely eliminate his own impact on the climate, and he sometimes stands in the grocery store, wondering what he can possibly justify eating. He is not in regular contact with his family - a situation that clearly pains him deeply - and his voice still shakes when he talks about his children. "I am so sorry that I was not able to listen, or sit still enough, or be present with them enough so that they could share whatever they were feeling," he says now. "I failed to stay close and safe, and be somebody they could count on, and that will always be my single greatest shame."

Foster's trial began in Cavalier, a tiny town in North Dakota, on Oct. 2 of last year, and after two and a half days of testimony, the jury convicted him of felony criminal mischief, felony conspiracy to commit criminal mischief and criminal trespass, a misdemeanor. He was found innocent only of reckless endangerment. Foster's co-defendant, Sam Jessup, a 32-year-old carpenter who accompanied him to the valve and live-streamed its closing, was convicted of felony conspiracy to commit criminal mischief and misdemeanor criminal conspiracy. (The charges against Schlosberg were dropped.) In pretrial hearings, Judge Fontaine ruled that Foster and Jessup would not be allowed to mount a necessity defense, just as the judges had ruled in Ward's case in Washington and Leonard Higgins's in Montana. Lawyers for the two other Valve Turners, Emily Johnston and Annette Klapstein, were able to persuade the judge to allow that defense in their forthcoming trial, but the decision has been appealed by the prosecution. As a result, the climate scientist James Hansen, who attended Foster and Jessup's trial, was not allowed to testify, but it's very unlikely that more information about climate change would have altered the verdict.

Unlike the divided jurors in Ward's trial, all the jurors in Cavalier were persuaded that Foster and Jessup were guilty of something. "If you want to protest, you can protest," one juror told me, "but you can't go on to someone else's property and destroy things." Lonny Johnson, the TransCanada employee who visited the site after Foster turned the valve, testified that the valve wasn't designed to be closed against pressure as Foster had done, but that he'd found no cracks or leaks when he inspected it. The prosecutors, however, argued that a leak could have caused a fire or explosion or polluted the nearby Pembina River. During jury selection, several potential jurors said that they had heard about Foster's action while listening to police scanners and had been so frightened by the potential consequences that they did not feel they could serve on the jury.

After his conviction, Foster returned to Seattle to await sentencing. He continued to plant trees, give slide shows and talk publicly about his decision to turn off the Keystone Pipeline, and he gave several guest sermons at liberal churches, some inspired by Thoreau's essay "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience." "Hilarious to think my emotional experience is no different today," he told me in a text.

On Feb. 5, he and Jessup were back in Cavalier for their sentencing, accompanied by Klapstein, Higgins and family members. The temperature was well below freezing even at midday, and the frosted streets were quiet. That evening, in the bar of the town's only motel, the two prosecuting attorneys sat together, while Foster and his group ate dinner just a few feet away. Foster was in a reflective mood. "It's so strange to think that tomorrow I could get 21 years - or I could be free for lunch," he said.

The next morning, inside the century-old county courthouse, Judge Fontaine asked if Foster wanted to make a statement before his sentencing. "Yes, Your Honor," Foster said.

Apologizing pre-emptively for his tendency to "start preaching," Foster spoke for almost 20 minutes, invoking the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi and Thoreau. "I don't know if this action was effective," he said. "If somebody else, somewhere down the line, takes some meaning from what I did and they apply it in the way that they see fit, that's what my action was meant to do."

Jessup, weighing his words carefully, spoke next. "For my entire adult life, I've been concerned about this issue," he said. "I came to North Dakota because I had a hope that through the necessity defense, the people of North Dakota would be given the opportunity to consider the evidence and weigh in, participate in a public deliberation in a way that I haven't seen." He added, "I don't think that this was a perfect realization of that vision."

Judge Fontaine announced a short recess. "This is not a typical criminal case," she said when she returned. She had rejected the necessity defense because, in her view, there were still legal means to address climate change. "If you can't convince the government, then you convince the people," she said, "and it seems to me the way you convince the people in this world is by 60-second sound bites, by commercials."

She had, she said, received many letters on Foster's behalf, most describing him as generous to his community and as doing exemplary work with kids. A few, however, described him as narcissistic and attention-seeking. "You like being in front of the camera, you like all the attention," she said. "Everything about you, and everything you've said to me, is this was the right thing to do, this is what I'm called to do, this is what I have to do. So nothing about that tells me you wouldn't do the same thing next month, next year, next week."

Judge Fontaine sentenced Foster to three years in prison, with two of those years to be suspended and served on supervised probation. Jessup was given a suspended sentence of two years. When the hearing ended, two officers approached Foster. He stood, and as he silently mouthed, "I love you," to his supporters in the front row, he was escorted out of the courtroom. Jessup stayed behind the defense table, looking lost.

The next afternoon, Higgins and I visited the county jail, an 18-bed operation tucked behind the courthouse. We stood in the cramped cinder-block visiting booth, separated from Foster by a thick sheet of Plexiglas, and took turns speaking to him through a phone handset. Foster was dressed in bright orange prison scrubs topped with a matching sweatshirt, and he looked tired but happy. Higgins, whose own sentencing for felony criminal mischief and misdemeanor criminal trespass is scheduled for March 20, teased Foster about his new wardrobe, and Foster laughed. "I'm going to miss everyone," he said. "The isolation's going to be hard." He would miss fresh air too. Thoreau's cabin wasn't much bigger than a jail cell, but he got to go outside whenever he liked. Foster acknowledged, though, that he was there by choice, and said he had regrets about his statement to the judge. "I blew it. I really didn't speak to her concerns." But for the moment, at least, he felt as if he were in the right place. Then he paraphrased the man he portrayed onstage 30 years ago: "If society is unjust, the only just place for a person is in jail."

Michelle Nijhuis is a project editor at The Atlantic who also writes about science for various publications, including National Geographic. This is her first article for the magazine.
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'I'm Just More Afraid of Climate Change Than I Am of Prison'

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On Oct. 11, 2016, Michael Foster and two companions rose before dawn, left their budget hotel in Grand Forks, N.D., and drove a white rental sedan toward the Canadian border, diligently minding the speed limit. The day was cold and overcast, and Foster, his diminutive frame wrapped in a down jacket, had prepared for a morning outdoors.

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Drought + civil unrest = crisis

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Is water the reason for the latest unrest in Iran?

Not entirely. Water alone doesn't explain the outbreak of protests that began in early January and spread swiftly across the country. But as David Michel, an analyst at the Stimson Center put it, the lack of water - whether it's dry taps in the city, or dry wells in the countryside, or dust storms rising from a shrinking Lake Urmia - is one of the most common, most visible markers of the government's failure to deliver basic services.

"Water is not going to bring down the government," he said. "But it's a component - in some towns, a significant component - of grievances and frustrations."

Managing water, he said, is the government's "most important policy challenge."

How did it get this bad?

Like many countries, from India to Syria, Iran after the 1979 revolution set out to be self-sufficient in food. It wasn't a bad goal, in and of itself. But as the Iranian water expert Kaveh Madani points out, it meant that the government encouraged farmers to plant thirsty crops like wheat throughout the country. The government went further by offering farmers cheap electricity and favorable prices for their wheat - effectively a generous two-part subsidy that served as an incentive to plant more and more wheat and extract more and more groundwater.

The result: "25 percent of the total water that is withdrawn from aquifers, rivers and lakes exceeds the amount that can be replenished" by nature, according to Claudia Sadoff, a water specialist who prepared a report for the World Bank on Iran's water crisis.

Iran's groundwater depletion rate is today among the fastest in the world, so much so that by Mr. Michel's calculations, 12 of the country's 31 provinces "will entirely exhaust their aquifers within the next 50 years." In parts of the country, the groundwater loss is causing the land to sink.

Water is a handy political tool, and to curry favor with their rural base, Iran's leaders - and particularly the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps - dammed rivers across the country to divert water to key areas. As a result, many of Iran's lakes have shrunk. That includes Lake Urmia, once the region's largest saltwater lake, which has diminished in size by nearly 90 percent since the early 1970s.

Does climate change play a role?

According to the government, Iran expects a 25 percent decline in surface water runoff - rainfall and snow melt - by 2030. In the region as a whole, summers are predicted to get hotter, by two to three degrees Celsius at current rates of warming, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Rains are projected to decline by 10 percent.

A 2015 study by two scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology predicted that, at current rates of warming, "many major cities in the region could exceed a tipping point for human survival."

For the leaders of water-stressed countries, the most sobering lesson comes from nearby Syria. Its drought, stretching from 2006 to 2009, prompted a mass migration from country to city and then unemployment among the young. Frustrations built up. And in 2011, street protests broke out, only to be crushed by the government of Bashar al-Assad. It piled on to long-simmering frustrations of Syrians under Mr. Assad's authoritarian rule. A civil war erupted, reshaping the Middle East.

Water, said Julia McQuaid, the deputy director of CNA, doesn't lead straight to conflict. "It can be catalyst," she said. "It can be a thing that breaks the system."

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Warming, Water Crisis, Then Unrest: How Iran Fits an Alarming Pattern

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Is water the reason for the latest unrest in Iran? Not entirely. Water alone doesn't explain the outbreak of protests that began in early January and spread swiftly across the country.

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Fighting Climate Change One Laundry Load at a Time

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Fighting Climate Change One Laundry Load at a Time

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Next, they found a way to mass produce the enzyme. Novozymes implanted the newly developed product's DNA into a batch of microbial hosts used to cultivate large volumes of enzymes quickly and at low cost. The enzymes were then "brewed" in large, closely monitored tanks before being sold.

The result: a crucial ingredient in detergents like Tide Cold Water.

"This is biotechnology on a very large scale," said Jes Bo Tobiassen, the manager of a Novozymes manufacturing facility in Kalundborg, a small coastal city in Denmark.

As it researches new enzymes, Novozymes is trying to reach consumers in fast-growing economies, like China.

In much of the developed world, laundry habits are relatively entrenched. Europeans tend to use front-loading washers, which are far more efficient in energy and water use than the top-loaders favored in the United States.

But in China, members of the growing middle class like Shen Hang are upgrading washing machines and turning to more expensive, higher-quality detergents. While Chinese consumers are among the world's most frequent and fastidious washers of clothes, according to Novozymes researchers, they aren't as set in their ways.

Mr. Shen recently bought an efficient front-loading washer-dryer. But he has struggled to find a detergent that can get his sweat-stained shirt collars clean.

"I'm kind of sick of that," he said of manufacturers' exaggerated claims.

He uses two types of bleach, one for white clothes and one for colored. If they do not work, he manually rubs the stains with his hands. He repeats that cycle three times a week.

Sensing an opportunity, Novozymes's commercial teams have pushed the company's scientists to create enzymes that would perform better in the bleach-filled washes favored in China.

The company has made progress. A newly developed enzyme named Progress Uno is being added to liquid detergents manufactured by Liby, a Chinese company.

At this point, Chinese consumers mostly wash at low temperatures. But Peder Holk Nielsen, the chief executive of Novozymes, worries that could change as wealth in China grows. Consumers did the same in the West in the decades after World War II, Mr. Nielsen said.

But if, thanks to enzyme development, that transition can be avoided, that would be "a phenomenal sustainability story," he said. "It is going to save so much water, and so much energy."

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Fighting Climate Change, One Laundry Load at a Time

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Next, they found a way to mass produce the enzyme. Novozymes implanted the newly developed product's DNA into a batch of microbial hosts used to cultivate large volumes of enzymes quickly and at low cost. The enzymes were then "brewed" in large, closely monitored tanks before being sold.

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This is Earth. It's a crisp fall day. So why would you believe Earth is in a dire situation?

Let's look a little deeper. The brownarea below representsall the fossil fuels - oil, coal, and natural gas - that humans have identified as recoverable with current technology. The black spot is what we're currently harvesting with mines and wells.

So what if, tomorrow, all the world leaders got together and decided to stop building new mines and wells?

And then we used all the fuel in existing mines and wells.

What would that do to Earth?

It wouldrelease about 1.1 trillion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Scientists have figured out thatthis scenario would almost certainly drive up the Earth's average temperatureby more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), relative to preindustrial levels. That's not a big deal, right?

Actually, it would be a massive catastrophe. The human suffering would be unthinkable.

When most of us think about Earth warming by 2 degrees, we think about it being, well, 2 degrees warmer.

But that's not quite right. First of all, it means Earth would get an average of 2 degrees warmer. This means some regions, especially on land, will get much hotter - far more than 2 degrees.

The Arctic, which houses much of the world's ice, would warm by almost 11 degrees Fahrenheit.

The US Southwest, already suffering from increased drought, could warm by almost 10 degrees Fahrenheit, enough to create near-permanent "superdroughts."

The other problem is that Earth's ecosystems would behave differently. For humans, it would mean rising sea levels, freshwater shortages, reduced agricultural productivity, food stress, and the conflicts and emigration that come in their wake.

A lot of people will die, and not because they burn to death. It'll be because we don't have enough food and water.

It would be like slightly heating up a fish tank, which is okay for the fish but kills the algae the fish eats.

All of this will be well underway by the time we hit 2 degrees - and the further we go past it, the worse it will get.

So we all agreed, in Paris, not to let it happen

About 200 countries, including all the world's major emitters, agreed at a summit in Paris in 2015 that letting the planet warm beyond 2 degrees is unacceptable, and even 2 degrees is awful. We vowedto do our best to stop warmingat 1.5 degrees - although most climateresearchers believe that target is no longer realistic.

That's why we hear so much about efforts to stop warming at 2 degrees.

But how do we do it?

First, we figure out how much carbon dioxide we're allowed to emit

When we burn fossil fuels, we emit several harmful gases. But we focus on carbon dioxide for one reason: It stays in the atmosphere for centuries, accumulating and trapping heat.

This means we can calculate how much carbon dioxide it would take to warm the Earth a certain amount.

According to our best calculations, it would take about 843 billion tons of carbon dioxide to warm Earth about 2 degrees.

If we decide to keep using fossil fuels at the same rate, we'll hit our limit in 21 years

Currently we emit about 39.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year - and that number is only rising. But if we were able to keep it at that amount, what would happen?

After one year, our mug would look like this:

It's not a huge hit. But after 21.5 years, we'd be here:

That's the year 2037.

If we reduce emissions until we get to zero in the year 2065, we still need to invent world-changing technology

Let's say that over the next49 years, we drive down our use of fossil fuels all the way to zero.

It's an optimistic long shot. But this is the scenario climate scientist Joeri Rogelj proposes:

The kicker is that even in this crazily ambitiousscenario,we have to rely on "negative emissions" technologies that pull carbon out of the air and bury it.

The problem: We have no clue if that's even possible.

Negative emissions technologies have not been tested or proven at any scale. We are literally gambling our species' future on the idea that we're going to be able to invent it and scale it up to enormous size ... by 2065.

Let's say, somehow, we get to no emissions in 2065 - and we invent this world-changing technology

We've saved the world, right?

Not definitely. It would only give us a 66 percent chance at staying under 2 degrees.

Remember when we all agreed in Paris that 2 degree warming cannot happen? This long shot is what they were committing to.

Given the evidence, the global community has committed not tolet the Earth warm by more than 2 degrees. In doing so, countries committed to rapidly reducing and eliminating all production and use of coal, oil, and natural gas and to inventing and scaling up negative emissions technology.

The problem is they don't seem to realize that's what they committed to.

No country is taking this long shot seriously. This means Earth will probably warm past 2 degrees. It's terrifying.

Right now, the cool fall wind is flowing through windows, and everything feels fine. Nothing seems dire. So it's understandable why many of us don't feel this is an urgent political priority.

But here's the reality: We're heading toward a global catastrophe that will cause unthinkable human suffering. The data is clear: We need to turn the ship now - or else we'll never be able to avoid disaster.

But no country is taking this 2 degree goal seriously. It hasn't even been mentioned in a presidential debate.

Instead, we're focusing on threats that feel more imminent. It's just the way most humans are calibrated. So our true test is figuring out a way to comprehend that a mortal threat is on the horizon, and act accordingly.

Correction: This story focuses on a scenario from climate scientist Joeri Rogelj, which would give us a 66 percent chance at limiting warming to 2 degrees, which would requires no emissions by 2065, followed by negative emissions. But a previous version of this story said we would need to reach no emissions by 2050, which is part of a scenario in which we give ourselves a 50 percent chance at staying under 1.5 degrees warming - a far less realistic goal.

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Show this cartoon to anyone who doubts we need huge action on climate change

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This is Earth. It's a crisp fall day. So why would you believe Earth is in a dire situation? Let's look a little deeper. The brownarea below representsall the fossil fuels - oil, coal, and natural gas - that humans have identified as recoverable with current technology.

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Dear EarthTalk: Don't all these huge snow and ice storms across the country mean that the globe isn't really warming? I've never seen such a winter!
-- Mark Franklin, Helena, MT

On the surface it certainly can appear that way. But just because some of us are suffering through a particularly cold and snowy winter doesn't refute the fact that the globe is warming as we continue to pump carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 1997. And the National Atmospheric and Oceanographic Administration (NOAA) reports that recent decades have been the warmest since at least around 1000 AD, and that the warming we've seen since the late 19th century is unprecedented over the last 1,000 years.

"You can't tell much about the climate or where it's headed by focusing on a particularly frigid day, or season, or year, even," writes Eoin O'Carroll of the Christian Science Monitor. "It's all in the long-term trends," concurs Dr. Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Most scientists agree that we need to differentiate between weather and climate. The NOAA defines climate as the average of weather over at least a 30-year period. So periodic aberrations-like the harsh winter storms ravaging the Southeast and other parts of the country this winter-do not call the science of human-induced global warming into question.

The flip side of the question, of course, is whether global warming is at least partly to blame for especially harsh winter weather. As we pointed out in a recent EarthTalk column, warmer temperatures in the winter of 2006 caused Lake Erie to not freeze for the first time in its history. This actually led to increased snowfalls because more evaporating water from the lake was available for precipitation.

But while more extreme weather events of all kinds-from snowstorms to hurricanes to droughts-are likely side effects of a climate in transition, most scientists maintain that any year-to-year variation in weather cannot be linked directly to either a warming or cooling climate.

Even most global warming skeptics agree that a specific cold snap or freak storm doesn't have any bearing on whether or not the climate problem is real. One such skeptic, Jimmy Hogan of the Rational Environmentalist website writes, "If we are throwing out anecdotal evidence that global warming we must at the same time throw out anecdotal evidence that it." He cites environmental groups holding up Hurricane Katrina as proof of global warming as one example of the latter.

If nothing else, we should all keep in mind that every time we turn up the thermostat this winter to combat the cold, we are contributing to global warming by consuming more fossil fuel power. Until we can shift our economy over to greener energy sources, global warming will be a problem, regardless of how warm or cold it is outside.

CONTACTS: NASA, www.nasa.gov; NOAA, www.noaa.gov.

EarthTalk is produced by E/The Environmental Magazine. GOT AN ENVIRONMENTAL QUESTION? Send it to: EarthTalk, c/o E/The Environmental Magazine, P.O. Box 5098, Westport, CT 06881; submit it at: www.emagazine.com/earthtalk/thisweek/, or e-mail: earthtalk@emagazine.com. Read past columns at: www.emagazine.com/earthtalk/archives.php.

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Why Global Warming Can Mean Harsher Winter Weather

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Dear EarthTalk: Don't all these huge snow and ice storms across the country mean that the globe isn't really warming? I've never seen such a winter! -- Mark Franklin, Helena, MT On the surface it certainly can appear that way.

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The Political Roots of Houston’s Flooding | The Nation

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The Political Roots of Houston’s Flooding | The Nation

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Roane Carey is managing editor of The Nation. He went to Houston to visit family, and because of the hurricane was stuck there for a week. This interview has been edited and condensed.

Jon Wiener: The city of Houston, we've learned, is enormous. It has the fourth-largest population in the country, and it stretches out over 600 square miles. Beyond that is more suburban development. How much has that sprawl been a factor in the flooding?

Roane Carey: It's been a key part of it. The politics behind this flooding have been obscured by the human story, and there's obvious reasons for that. But for anyone who wants to understand why it has been so bad, they need to understand how development has made things worse. Going back at least to the 1930s, Houston has been a flood zone. Everyone has known that. They had catastrophic floods in the 1930s and 1940s. There has been a big battle between developers and city fathers on one side, and engineers, flood specialists, and scientists on the other, over the need to prevent development in key flood zones and grasslands. And almost always, the people who really know about how flooding works have lost that battle. Developers have continued to develop in places where they need to keep grassland, because grasslands are the sponges for these massive rains. Instead, we've seen the paving over of huge freshwater floodplains.

The Katy Prairie is a great example. That's a huge area west of the center of Houston, much of which has been paved over. Many of the people who've been forced out of their homes, who've had to be rescued, who've had all their possessions destroyed, lived in subdivisions there-despite the fact that scientists said, "You better not develop there, because that's prone to flooding."

The other thing to remember is that the old maps of flood zones have become obsolete. Areas have been hit that had never been flooded before. In the spring of 2016 we had what are called the Tax Day Floods, which were considered hundred-year floods-or 500-year floods, as many reports claim. There were the Memorial Day Floods of spring of 2015, which were also considered 100- or 500-year floods. There was catastrophic flooding from Tropical Storm Allison in the summer of 2001, which was considered unprecedented. We've been having storms that are bringing in much more water than ever before, and they're flooding areas that have never, never flooded before. So they need to completely rework what are considered 100- and 500-year flood zones-because now, by that definition, we're getting a 500-year flood every year.

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The Political Roots of Houston's Flooding

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Roane Carey is managing editor of The Nation. He went to Houston to visit family, and because of the hurricane was stuck there for a week. This interview has been edited and condensed. Jon Wiener: The city of Houston, we've learned, is enormous.

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We had all better hope these scientists are wrong about the planet’s future - The Washington Post

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We had all better hope these scientists are wrong about the planet’s future - The Washington Post

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An influential group of scientists led by James Hansen, the former NASA scientist often credited with having drawn the first major attention to climate change in 1988 congressional testimony, has published a dire climate study that suggests the impact of global warming will be quicker and more catastrophic than generally envisioned.

The research invokes collapsing ice sheets, violent megastorms and even the hurling of boulders by giant waves in its quest to suggest that even 2 degrees Celsius of global warming above pre-industrial levels would be far too much. Hansen has called it the most important work he has ever done.

The sweeping paper, 52 pages in length and with 19 authors, draws on evidence from ancient climate change or "paleo-climatology," as well as climate experiments using computer models and some modern observations. Calling it a "paper" really isn't quite right - it's actually a synthesis of a wide range of old, and new, evidence.

[The world's most famous climate scientist just outlined an alarming scenario for our planet's future]

"I think almost everybody who's really familiar with both paleo and modern is now very concerned that we are approaching, if we have not passed, the points at which we have locked in really big changes for young people and future generations," Hansen said in an interview.

The research, appearing Tuesday in the open-access journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics,has had a long and controversial path to life, having first appeared as a "discussion paper" in the same journal, subject to live, online peer review - a novel but increasingly influential form of scientific publishing. Hansen first told the news media about the research last summer, before this process was completed, leading to criticism from some journalists and fellow scientists that he might be jumping the gun.

What ensued was a high-profile debate, both because of the dramatic claims and Hansen's formidable reputation. And his numerous co-authors, including Greenland and Antarctic ice experts and a leader of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, were nothing to be sniffed at.

After record downloads for the study and an intense public review process, a revised version of the paper has now been accepted, according to both Hansen and Barbara Ferreira, media and communications manager for the European Geosciences Union, which publishes Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. Indeed, the article is now freely readable on the Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics website.

The paper, according to Ferreira, was subject to "major revisions in terms of organisation, title and conclusions." Those came in response to criticisms that can all be read publicly at the journal's website. The paper also now has two additional authors.

Most notably, perhaps, the editorial process led to the removal of the use of the phrase "highly dangerous," in the paper's title, to describe warming the planet by 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

[What we're doing to the Earth has no parallel in 66 million years, scientists say]

The original paper's title was "Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 °C global warming is highly dangerous." The final title is "Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 °C global warming could be dangerous."

But nonetheless, James Hansen's climate catastrophe scenario now takes its place in the official scientific literature relatively intact. So let's rehearse that scenario, again, for the record.

Hansen and his colleagues think that major melting of Greenland and Antarctica can not only happen quite fast - leading to as much as several meters of sea level rise in the space of a century, depending on how quickly melt rates double - but that this melting will have dramatic climate change consequences, beyond merely raising sea levels.

That's because, they postulate, melting will cause a "stratification" of the polar oceans. What this means is that it will trap a pool of cold, fresh meltwater atop the ocean surface, with a warmer ocean layer beneath. We have actually seen a possible hint of this with the anomalously cold "blob" of ocean water off the southern coast of Greenland, which some have attributed to Greenland's melting.

Indeed, shortly before the new paper's publication, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released new recent data on the globe's temperature that certainly bears a resemblance to what Hansen is talking about. For not only was the globe at a record warmth overall over the last three months, but it also showed anomalous cool patches in regions that Hansen suspects are being caused by ice melt - below Greenland, and also off the tip of the Antarctic peninsula.

"My interpretation is that this is the beginning," Hansen says of these cool patches in curious parts of the global ocean. "And it's one or two decades sooner than in our model."

However, when it comes to both the melt rates for Greenland and Antarctica, and also these cool ocean patches, we have a very limited time span of observations. It is far from clear, yet, that Hansen's interpretation of them will prevail, and the new study also suggests closely observing these areas in coming years.

Stratification, the key idea in the new paper, means that warm ocean water would potentially reach the base of ice sheets that sit below sea level, melting them from below (and causing more ice melt and thus, stratification). It also means, in Hansen's paper, a slowdown or even eventual shutdown of the overturning circulation in the Atlantic ocean, due to too much freshening in the North Atlantic off and around Greenland, and also a weakening of another overturning circulation in the Southern Ocean.

This, in turn, causes cooling in the North Atlantic region, even as global warming creates a warmer equatorial region. This growing north-south temperature differential, in the study, drives more intense mid-latitude cyclones, or storms. The study suggests such storms may kick up gigantic oceanic waves, which may even be capable of feats such as hurling boulders in some locations, not unlike the huge rocks seen on the Bahamian island of Eleuthera, which I visited with Hansen and his co-author, geologist Paul Hearty, in November.

[That's heavy: Climate-change warnings include rising seas and wild weather shifts. But giant flying boulders?]

These rocks play a key role in the new paper, just as they did in the original study draft. Indeed, long before the current paper, Hearty had documented, in peer-reviewed publications, that Eleuthera's rocks appear to have come from the ocean and to have been lifted high up onto a coastal ridge. This appears to have happened during a past warm period, the Eemian, some 120,000 years ago, when the planet was only slightly warmer than today but seas were far higher - but the idea is that something like it could happen again.

The paper contains many ideas and departures, but the key one is its suggestion of the possibility of greater sea level rise in this century than forecast by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

"The models that were run for the IPCC report did not include ice melt," Hansen said at a news conference regarding the new paper Monday. "And we also conclude that most models, ours included, have excessive small scale mixing, and that tends to limit the effect of this freshwater lens on the ocean surface from melting of Greenland and Antarctica."

There is a great deal at stake. Hansen has cited the paper in court proceedings in a case playing out in Oregon, where a series of young plaintiffs, including his granddaughter Sophie, are suing the United States for violating their constitutional rights by allowing fossil fuel burning. While scientists will have to digest the new version of the paper, when the initial draft paper was released, at the website of Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions, it prompted both scientific praise and also major skepticism.

David Archer, a geoscientist at the University of Chicago and a reviewer for the first round of the paper, called it "another Hansen masterwork of scholarly synthesis, modeling virtuosity, and insight, with profound implications." But Peter Thorne, another official reviewer and a climate researcher with the National University of Ireland Maynooth, wrote that "it is far from certain that the results contended shall match what will happen in the real-world." Thorne also expressed his "personal discomfort at the paper being openly and actively publicized before the discussion period is complete."

Michael Mann, a Pennsylvania State University climate scientist familiar with the original study, said: "Near as I can tell, the issues that caused me concern originally still remain in the revised manuscript. Namely, the projected amounts of meltwater seem unphysically large, and the ocean component of their model doesn't resolve key wind-driven current systems (e.g. the Gulf Stream) which help transport heat poleward. That makes northern hemisphere temperatures in their study too sensitive to changes in the Atlantic meridional overturning ocean circulation," the scientific name for the ocean circulation in the Atlantic that, the study suggests, could shut down.

However, another Penn State researcher, glaciologist Richard Alley, said by email that "though this is one paper, it usefully reminds us that large and rapid changes are possible, and it raises important research questions as to what those changes might mean if they were to occur. But, the paper does not include enough ice-sheet physics to tell us how much how rapidly is how likely."
Read more at Energy & Environment: The profound planetary consequences of eating less meat This little flea - and its huge appetite - could ruin the Great Lakes This huge change in how we get energy is coming much faster than expected The great thaw: 'If you want to see it, you'd better hurry. It's disappearing - fast.' For more, you can sign up for our weekly newsletter here, and follow us on Twitter here.

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We had all better hope these scientists are wrong about the planet's future

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An influential group of scientists led by James Hansen, the former NASA scientist often credited with having drawn the first major attention to climate change in 1988 congressional testimony, has published a dire climate study that suggests the impact of global warming will be quicker and more catastrophic than generally envisioned.

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For the love of Earth, stop traveling - The Washington Post

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For the love of Earth, stop traveling - The Washington Post

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Jack Miles, a Pulitzer Prize and MacArthur "genius" award-winning author, was a contributor to the University of California's "Bending the Curve" report on climate stability. His forthcoming book is "God in the Koran" (Alfred A. Knopf 2018).
According to former U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres, we have only three years left in which to " bend the emissions curve downward " and forestall a terrifying cascade of climate-related catastrophes, much worse than what we're already experiencing. Realistically, is there anything that you or I can do as individuals to make a significant difference in the short time remaining?

The answer is yes, and the good news is it won't cost us a penny. It will actually save us money, and we won't have to leave home to do it. Staying home, in fact, is the essence of making a big difference in a big hurry. That's because nothing that we do pumps carbon dioxide into the atmosphere faster than air travel. Cancel a couple long flights, and you can halve your carbon footprint. Schedule a couple, and you can double or triple it.

Atmosfair is a German public interest group that recommends limiting your air travel to about 3,100 miles per year - if you live in Los Angeles, that's one round-trip flight to Mexico City. If you must exceed that limit, Atmosfair invites you to compensate by sending conscience money on a prorated basis to support climate stabilization efforts around the world. Last fall, having accepted an invitation to speak in Morocco, I used this online calculator to determine the carbon cost of my trip. My seats alone on the round-trip flights from Los Angeles to Casablanca (with a layover in Paris) helped emit about 8,400 pounds of carbon dioxide, prorated, into the atmosphere. Double that because my wife accompanied me. In sum, our seats alone on the planes to and from Morocco helped unload about 16,800 pounds of carbon dioxide. And this, of course, was just a small fraction of the emissions cost of the flight as a whole.

To put this into perspective, my wife's and my annual carbon footprint in Orange County, California - counting gas, electricity, transportation and waste disposal - is about 33,000 pounds, according to the carbon footprint calculator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. (To put that total into further perspective, the average Indian's annual carbon footprint is just 3,000 pounds.) By taking one optional international trip that helped emit about 16,800 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, my wife and I increased our 2016 carbon footprint by more than a third. The harm we did with one international trip surely neutralized any good that we did all year as recyclers, eco-consumers and financial contributors to environmental organizations.

To put our flights' 16,800 pounds of carbon dioxide further into perspective, the average American generates about 1,300 pounds of carbon dioxide a year through beef consumption. Minute by minute, mile by mile, nothing that we do causes greater or more easily avoidable harm to the environment than flying, which more often than not is optional or merely recreational.

The delegates meeting in Bonn, Germany next week for the U.N. climate conference recognize this. "The lion's share of greenhouse gas emissions" from the COP23 conference, the organizers note, "is from long-distance air travel." After the conference, a COP23 sustainability task force will tally up the overall carbon footprint and seek to offset as much as possible by buying certified emission reduction credits, many of which will go to green development projects in small island states in recognition of Fiji holding the presidency of this conference.

There are 7 billion people on our planet, but the billion with the largest carbon footprint includes the most frequent fliers. I belong to the top billion. So do many of you. If all 7 billion had a carbon footprint as large as ours, global carbon dioxide emissions would increase from the current 38 billion tons per year to 150 billion tons - a trillion tons every seven years, according to " Bending the Curve," a 2015 University of California report. That trillion would translate into a catastrophic spike in global warming - an increase of 33 degrees Fahrenheit every seven years.

So for the love of the Earth, our common home, our only home, start conducting more remote work meetings and training sessions virtually. Inform those jet-setting friends that you won't attend their destination wedding in the tropics - you'll send a gift in the mail. Tell that conference organizer that while you're honored to be invited, you would prefer to participate in live online sessions instead. Start taking vacations by train or car, rather than flying to Paris or beyond. Explain to your ecological public interest group that the Galápagos will be much better off without you. And please, all you professionals bouncing between New York City and Washington D.C., take a train, not a plane.

The 17th-century poet Andrew Marvell warned his "coy mistress" and himself that life was brief and youth briefer. They could wish it otherwise, but:

...at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.

In our day, the winged chariot that is hurrying near is species extinction. The deserts of vast eternity that lie before us are the wastelands of the planet itself as we send it to its death. But there is something you can do about all that - something big, something easily within reach, something that won't cost you time or money.

Take a deep, slow breath, and throw away that bucket list for good. You are needed at home, my friend, urgently needed. For the love of the Earth and of those who will inherit it when you are gone, stay right where you are.
This was produced by Correction: This op-ed has been updated with revised emissions calculations for the author's flight to Casablanca. The WorldPost, a partnership of the Berggruen Institute and The Washington Post.

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Opinion | For the love of Earth, stop traveling

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Jack Miles, a Pulitzer Prize and MacArthur "genius" award-winning author, was a contributor to the University of California's "Bending the Curve" report on climate stability. His forthcoming book is "God in the Koran" (Alfred A. Knopf 2018). According to former U.N.

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It is "extremely likely" that human activities are the "dominant cause" of global warming, according to the the most comprehensive study ever of climate science by U.S. government researchers.

The climate report, obtained by NPR, notes that the past 115 years are "the warmest in the history of modern civilization." The global average temperature has increased by about 1.8 degree Fahrenheit over that period. Greenhouse gases from industry and agriculture are by far the biggest contributor to warming.

The findings contradict statements by President Trump and many of his Cabinet members, who have openly questioned the role humans play in changing the climate.

"I believe that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do," EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said in an interview earlier this year. "There's tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact."

That is not consistent with the conclusions of the 600-plus page Climate Science Special Report, which is part of an even larger scientific review known as the fourth National Climate Assessment. The NCA4, as it's known, is the nation's most authoritative assessment of climate science. The report's authors include experts from leading scientific agencies, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA and the Department of Energy, as well as academic scientists.

The report states that the global climate will continue to warm. How much, it says, "will depend primarily on the amount of greenhouse gases (especially carbon dioxide) emitted globally." Without major reductions in emissions, it says, the increase in annual average global temperature could reach 9 degrees Fahrenheit. Efforts to reduce emissions, it says, would slow the rate of warming.

"This is good, solid climate science," says Richard Alley, a geoscientist at Penn State University who says he made minor contributions to the report's conclusions on sea level rise. "This has been reviewed so many times in so many ways, and it's taking what we know from ... a couple of centuries of climate science and applying it to the U.S."

The assessments are required by an act of Congress; the last one was published in 2014. Alley says this year's goes further in attributing changes in weather to the warming climate, especially weather extremes. "More heat waves and fewer old snaps, this is very clear," he says. The report also notes that warmer temperatures have contributed to the rise in forest fires in the West, and that the incidence of those fires is expected to keep rising.

Some of the clearest effects involve sea level rise. "Coastal flooding, you raise the mean level of the ocean, everything else equal you get more coastal flooding," Alley says. The report notes that sea level has risen 7 to 8 inches since 1900, and 3 inches of that occurred since 1993. The report says that rate is faster than during any century over the past 2,800 years.

The report also points out that heavy rainfall is increasing in intensity and frequency across the U.S., especially in the Northeast, and that's expected to keep increasing.

Other connections are harder to nail down, Alley says, such as whether a particular hurricane can be attributed to climate change.

"The Climate Science Special Report is like going to a doctor and being given a report on your vital signs," says environmental scientist Rachel Licker of the Union of Concerned Scientists. She notes that the authors assessed more than 1,500 scientific studies and reports in making their conclusions.

Alley adds that the new report "does a better job of seeing the human fingerprint in what's happening." He says that while he hasn't read all of it yet, he sees no evidence that it has been soft-pedaled or understates the certainty of the science.

Alley notes that "there's a little rumbling" among climate scientists who are concerned that the Trump administration will ignore this effort. "I think the authors really are interested in seeing [the report] used wisely by policy makers to help the economy as well as the environment."

The report has been submitted to the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House. Trump has yet to choose anyone to run that office; it remains one of the last unfilled senior positions in the White House staff.

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Massive Government Report Says Climate Is Warming And Humans Are The Cause

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It is "extremely likely" that human activities are the "dominant cause" of global warming, according to the the most comprehensive study ever of climate science by U.S. government researchers. The climate report, obtained by NPR, notes that the past 115 years are "the warmest in the history of modern civilization."

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Long-term forest study adds to evidence for dangerous feedback cycle from climate change - The Washington Post

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Long-term forest study adds to evidence for dangerous feedback cycle from climate change - The Washington Post

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One of the regular complaints of climate change doubters and skeptics is that scientific projections of a dire future are too heavily based on computer simulations, or models, which - they say - rest on a variety of questionable assumptions.

But a major climate change study published Thursday relied not on models but experimental data - a 26-year record of observations, no less - to reach a conclusion perhaps just as worrying. The research, tracking the emissions of carbon from artificially heated plots of a forest in Massachusetts, reinforces fears about the possibility of a climate change "feedback" involving the planet's soils, one that could pile on top of and substantially worsen the ongoing warming trend triggered by the burning of fossil fuels.

[Scientists have long feared this 'feedback' to the climate system. Now they say it's happening]

"The study is one of the longest if not the longest climate change ecosystem experiment, beyond the one we are running in our own planet," said Pep Canadell, an expert on the Earth's carbon cycle at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Australia. He was not part of the research.

Starting in 1991, a team of researchers have been studying the same 18 plots of forest soil in the Harvard Forest in Massachusetts. Six of the plots are entirely undisturbed, representing the natural state of the forest floor; six are artificially heated through underground cables to 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit) above the normal temperature; and six are "disturbed," meaning that they contain heating cables, but the cables are not actually powered, so the temperature is not altered.

The researchers involved - affiliated with the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Mass., the University of New Hampshire, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and New Hampshire-based Research Designs - have continually measured the difference in carbon dioxide emissions emanating from the different plots. The hypothesis is that warmer temperatures would lead microorganisms in the soil to become more active in breaking down plant matter and other materials. These microbes would then release more soil carbon into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide gas, in a process known as respiration.

Now, in the latest update of the findings published in the journal Science, the team reports that 17 percent of the carbon has now been lost from the upper layer of soil of the heated plots over the period of the study. Extrapolating to the scale of the planet, the researchers suggest, that could be a big deal.

"This magnitude of loss could amount to hundreds of petagrams - billions of metric tons - of carbon fluxing from the world's forest soils to the atmosphere, if those soils responded to warming like the Harvard forest soils have done over the experimental period," said Jerry Melillo, a scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole who has overseen the research for nearly three decades. (A petagram is equivalent to a billion metric tons.)

The study suggests a possible release of about 190 petagrams over the course of the century from the top meter of the Earth's soil, which it calculates is "equivalent to the past two decades of carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning." And Melillo said that the possibility of this occurring isn't adequately taken into account in future climate change projections.

"I think that everyone agrees that we don't include the microbial feedback mechanisms very well in climate models," Melillo said.

That said, the Harvard Forest study contains some subtleties and surprises. Notably, the soil carbon did not stream out of the ground continuously over the 26-year period. Rather, the release occurred in four phases.

First there was a large burst of carbon that happened over the initial 10 years. Then, the carbon releases ceased for about the next seven years, as the heated plots ceased to show any difference from the non-heated ones. Then the emissions resumed - and then, most recently, stopped again.

The pattern appears to reflect the kinds of organisms in the soil changing so as to favor organisms that consume carbon in different ways. "One of the things that became very apparent is that we were changing in significant ways the structure of the microbial community," Melillo said.

The research arrives a little under a year after another influential study compiled the results of 49 separate field studies on soil carbon emissions and concluded that this feedback is indeed real, based on the balance of the research. That study concluded that the feedback could lead to 50 petagrams of emissions just by 2050.

Still, there are several important cautions about the latest research, noted Canadell, who also heads up the Global Carbon Project, which annually releases figures on how much carbon fossil fuels and other parts of the Earth's system have put in the atmosphere.

"By definition, manipulative experiments like this one, are systems treated with a shock perturbation overnight," he said by email. But a sudden soil temperature increase of 5 degrees Celsius "is unrealistic to what is happening or will happen the real world," Canadell continued, noting that global warming actually proceeds "at several decimal points of a degree warming per decade."

Canadell also questioned the 190 petagram figure for possible global emissions by 2100, noting that the study "is in one type of ecosystem and in one single place in the world (a few hundreds of square meters), and the one thing we know is that different biomes and ecosystems are very different, and within, there are no two soils patches the same."

"This negative assessment, however, doesn't detract one bit from the extraordinary relevance of the data set and new understanding produced by Melillo's experiment," Canadell continued.

However the results ultimately get incorporated into our understanding of the planet, Melillo said, "I'm really quite thankful that there is a place in science for some of these long-term experiments at the systems level, where mechanisms unfold slowly over time."
Read more at Energy & Environment: Interior Department whistleblower resigns, calling Ryan Zinke's leadership a failure Scientists mapping Greenland have produced some surprising - and worrying - results One of the most bizarre ideas about climate change just found more evidence in its favor Rick Perry just proposed sweeping new steps to help struggling coal and nuclear plants For more, you can sign up for our weekly newsletter here, and follow us on Twitter here.

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One of the oldest climate change experiments has led to a troubling conclusion

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One of the regular complaints of climate change doubters and skeptics is that scientific projections of a dire future are too heavily based on computer simulations, or models, which - they say - rest on a variety of questionable assumptions.

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It’s Not Your Imagination. Summers Are Getting Hotter. - The New York Times

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It’s Not Your Imagination. Summers Are Getting Hotter. - The New York Times

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Extraordinarily hot summers - the kind that were virtually unheard-of in the 1950s - have become commonplace.

This year's scorching summer events, like heat waves rolling through southern Europe and temperatures nearing 130 degrees Fahrenheit in Pakistan, are part of this broader trend.

The chart above, based on data from James Hansen, a retired NASA climate scientist and professor at Columbia University, shows how summer temperatures have shifted toward more extreme heat over the past several decades.

To create the bell curves, Dr. Hansen and two colleagues compared actual summer temperatures for each decade since the 1980s to a fixed baseline average. During the base period, 1951 to 1980, about a third of local summer temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere were in what they called a "near average" or normal range. A third were considered cold; a third were hot.

Since then, summer temperatures have shifted drastically, the researchers found. Between 2005 and 2015, two-thirds of values were in the hot category, and nearly 15 percent were in a new category: extremely hot.

Practically, that means most summers are now either hot or extremely hot compared with the mid-20th century.

The big increase in summer temperatures under the dark red category of extreme heat is "right in line" with what scientists expect to see as the climate warms over all, said Todd Sanford, director of research at Climate Central, a nonprofit science and news organization.

For each time period above, the distribution of summer temperatures forms what is known as a bell curve because most measurements fall near the average, forming the bump - or bell - in the middle. More extreme temperatures, which happen less frequently, fall in the wings, with heat waves on the right and cold-snaps on the left.

As the curve's average - the top of the peak - shifts rightward over time, more temperatures in more places end up in the hot and extremely hot categories and fewer end up in the cold category.

Dr. Hansen's curves also flatten out, which some have suggested is an indication of greater temperature variability. But other climate scientists, including Zeke Hausfather, an energy systems analyst at the University of California, Berkeley, have pointed out that this effect is mainly a reflection that some parts of the world are warming faster than others. There is no evidence that temperatures are becoming more variable in most parts of the world after warming has been accounted for.

Dr. Hansen's data "really highlight that changes in the average, while they may seem modest, have big implications for the extremes. And that's what's going to affect society and ecosystems," Dr. Sanford said. The findings reveal what has happened so far, and also provide "a glimpse to what's in our future."

Temperature categories are determined by the normal distribution, so that a third of temperatures fall in each of the main three categories: hot, cold and normal for 1951 to 1980. Summer temperatures for each subsequent 11-year period are compared to the 1951 to 1980 baseline.

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It's Not Your Imagination. Summers Are Getting Hotter.

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Extraordinarily hot summers - the kind that were virtually unheard-of in the 1950s - have become commonplace. This year's scorching summer events, like heat waves rolling through southern Europe and temperatures nearing 130 degrees Fahrenheit in Pakistan, are part of this broader trend.

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Building a Better Coral Reef - The New York Times

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Building a Better Coral Reef - The New York Times

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And yet, on a three-day trip in July to harvest coral samples, he repeatedly found himself surprised. The Rib Reef, where he was diving, had been healthy and vibrant only a year ago. But during his return visit, large sections were dead, covered in algae that looked like soot.

The samples he collected - of the Pocillopora acuta species - were often the only healthy chunks of coral to be found among canyons of dead reefs.

Near the end of their research trip, he and two other scientists dove for nearly an hour before finding just three samples, which they removed with a hammer and chisel and placed in a metal supermarket dish rack for transport to the surface.

"This is probably a three-year-old coral," he said back on the boat, admiring a pinkish sample with a handful of healthy branches that made it look like a fist-size shrub. "We want to take the whole adult coral, collect its babies and then grow the larvae into adult coral."

Professor van Oppen, a senior scientist who oversees Dr. Cantin's research, said that part of what makes the Australian experiment stand out is the "sea simulator" at the Townsville marine institute. It is a complex high technology laboratory where corals live in tanks with water temperatures that can be calibrated to a tenth of a degree and simulate seasonal patterns of warming events. Lighting systems replicate the moon cycles that corals use to time their spawning.

Future generations of corals, the offspring of the those Dr. Cantin harvested, will be tested for resilience in this artificial environment, with warmer and more acidic water that mimics what scientists are predicting for the years 2050 and 2100.

The strongest corals will then become parents again, with some crossbreeding of the same species from different sections of the reef and also crossbreeding of different species to create genetic hybrids.

"If the speed of natural adaptation was fast enough to keep up with climate change, we wouldn't see the scale of loss we're seeing," Professor van Oppen said. "There's an urgent need to come up with ways to slow it down."

Professor van Oppen is collaborating with Dr. Gates, who heads the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology on a small island in Kaneohe Bay, off Oahu. Their joint project is partially funded by the family foundation of Mr. Allen, the billionaire philanthropist.

On a recent day at the lab, a manager, Jen Davidson, meticulously examined coral colonies growing in indoor tanks under artificial lights.

Starting with hardy coral polyps that survived past environmental assaults in Kaneohe Bay, the Gates lab is trying to make them even hardier, crossbreeding the corals and testing offspring in water treated to mimic the hotter, more acidic conditions likely to prevail in a future ocean.

Under normal conditions the animals grow and build their reefs only slowly, one of the factors that is stymying the effort to save them. "We can do all this work here, but can we scale it up enough to make an impact?" Ms. Davidson asked.

Researchers in Florida may be closest to answering that question. At the Mote laboratory in Sarasota, a researcher named David Vaughan has perfected a technique in which coral samples are broken into tiny fragments; the polyps grow much faster than normal as they attempt to re-establish a colony.

"It used to take us six years to produce 600 corals," Dr. Vaughan said in an interview. "Now we can produce 600 corals in an afternoon, and be ready in a few months to plant them."

Florida's reefs have been badly damaged over the years, not just by climate change but by more direct human assaults, like overfishing that disturbs the ecological balance. Yet the Mote lab and other centers have already replanted thousands of small coral colonies.

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And yet, on a three-day trip in July to harvest coral samples, he repeatedly found himself surprised. The Rib Reef, where he was diving, had been healthy and vibrant only a year ago. But during his return visit, large sections were dead, covered in algae that looked like soot.

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Climate Change Is Complex. We’ve Got Answers to Your Questions. - The New York Times

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Climate Change Is Complex. We’ve Got Answers to Your Questions. - The New York Times

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Both are accurate, but they mean different things.

You can think of global warming as one type of climate change. The broader term covers changes beyond warmer temperatures, such as shifting rainfall patterns.

President Trump has claimed that scientists stopped referring to global warming and started calling it climate change because "the weather has been so cold" in winter. But the claim is false. Scientists have used both terms for decades.

Two degrees is more significant than it sounds.

As of early 2017, the Earth had warmed by roughly 2 degrees Fahrenheit (more than 1 degree Celsius) since 1880, when records began at a global scale. The number may sound low, but as an average over the surface of an entire planet, it is actually high, which explains why much of the world's land ice is starting to melt and the oceans are rising at an accelerating pace. If greenhouse gas emissions continue unchecked, scientists say, the global warming could ultimately exceed 8 degrees Fahrenheit, which would undermine the planet's capacity to support a large human population.

We've known about it for more than a century. Really.

In the 19th century, scientists discovered that certain gases in the air trap and slow down heat that would otherwise escape to space. Carbon dioxide is a major player; without any of it in the air, the Earth would be a frozen wasteland. The first prediction that the planet would warm as humans released more of the gas was made in 1896. The gas has increased 43 percent above the pre-industrial level so far, and the Earth has warmed by roughly the amount that scientists predicted it would.

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Sign up to receive our in-depth journalism about climate change around the world.

Hard evidence, including studies that use radioactivity to distinguish industrial emissions from natural emissions, shows that the extra gas is coming from human activity. Carbon dioxide levels rose and fell naturally in the long-ago past, but those changes took thousands of years. Geologists say that humans are now pumping the gas into the air much faster than nature has ever done.

In theory, they could be. If the sun were to start putting out more radiation, for instance, that would definitely warm the Earth. But scientists have looked carefully at the natural factors known to influence planetary temperature and found that they are not changing nearly enough. The warming is extremely rapid on the geologic time scale, and no other factor can explain it as well as human emissions of greenhouse gases.

Mostly because of ideology.

Instead of negotiating over climate change policies and trying to make them more market-oriented, some political conservatives have taken the approach of blocking them by trying to undermine the science.

President Trump has sometimes claimed that scientists are engaged in a worldwide hoax to fool the public, or that global warming was invented by China to disable American industry. The climate denialists' arguments have become so strained that even oil and coal companies have distanced themselves publicly, though some still help to finance the campaigns of politicians who espouse such views.

Over the coming 25 or 30 years, scientists say, the climate is likely to gradually warm, with more extreme weather. Coral reefs and other sensitive habitats are already starting to die. Longer term, if emissions rise unchecked, scientists fear climate effects so severe that they might destabilize governments, produce waves of refugees, precipitate the sixth mass extinction of plants and animals in the Earth's history, and melt the polar ice caps, causing the seas to rise high enough to flood most of the world's coastal cities. The emissions that create those risks are happening now, raising deep moral questions for our generation.

Are you rich enough to shield your descendants?

The simple reality is that people are already feeling the effects, whether they know it or not. Because of sea level rise, for instance, some 83,000 more residents of New York and New Jersey were flooded during Hurricane Sandy than would have been the case in a stable climate, scientists have calculated. Tens of thousands of people are already dying in heat waves made worse by global warming. The refugee flows that have destabilized politics around the world have been traced in part to climate change. Of course, as with almost all other social problems, poor people will be hit first and hardest.

The real question is how fast.

The ocean has accelerated and is now rising at a rate of about a foot per century, forcing governments and property owners to spend tens of billions of dollars fighting coastal erosion. But if that rate continued, it would probably be manageable, experts say.

The risk is that the rate will increase still more. Scientists who study the Earth's history say waters could rise by a foot per decade in a worst-case scenario, though that looks unlikely. Many experts believe that even if emissions stopped tomorrow, 15 or 20 feet of sea level rise is already inevitable, enough to flood many cities unless trillions of dollars are spent protecting them. How long it will take is unclear. But if emissions continue apace, the ultimate rise could be 80 or 100 feet.

Scientists have published strong evidence that the warming climate is making heat waves more frequent and intense. It is also causing heavier rainstorms, and coastal flooding is getting worse as the oceans rise because of human emissions. Global warming has intensified droughts in regions like the Middle East, and it may have strengthened a recent drought in California.

In many other cases, though - hurricanes, for example - the linkage to global warming for particular trends is uncertain or disputed. Scientists are gradually improving their understanding as computer analyses of the climate grow more powerful.

Yes, but change is happening too slowly.

Society has put off action for so long that the risks are now severe, scientists say. But as long as there are still unburned fossil fuels in the ground, it is not too late to act. The warming will slow to a potentially manageable pace only when human emissions are reduced to zero. The good news is that they are now falling in many countries as a result of programs like fuel-economy standards for cars, stricter building codes and emissions limits for power plants. But experts say the energy transition needs to speed up drastically to head off the worst effects of climate change.

Virtually every country agreed to limit future emissions.

The landmark deal was reached outside Paris in December 2015. The reductions are voluntary and the pledges do not do enough to head off severe effects. But the agreement is supposed to be reviewed every few years so that countries ramp up their commitments. President Trump announced in 2017 that he would pull the United States out of the deal, though that will take years, and other countries have said they would go forward regardless of American intentions.

Job growth in renewable energy is strong.

The energy sources with the lowest emissions include wind turbines, solar panels, hydroelectric dams and nuclear power stations. Power plants burning natural gas also produce fewer emissions than those burning coal. Converting to these cleaner sources may be somewhat costlier in the short term, but they could ultimately pay for themselves by heading off climate damages and reducing health problems associated with dirty air. And expansion of the market is driving down the costs of renewable energy so fast that it may ultimately beat dirty energy on price alone - it already does in some areas.

The transition to cleaner energy certainly produces losers, like coal companies, but it also creates jobs. The solar industry in the United States now employs more than twice as many people as coal mining.

Both could help clean up the energy system.

Hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," is one of a set of drilling technologies that has helped produce a new abundance of natural gas in the United States and some other countries. Burning gas instead of coal in power plants reduces emissions in the short run, though gas is still a fossil fuel and will have to be phased out in the long run. The fracking itself can also create local pollution.

"Clean coal" is an approach in which the emissions from coal-burning power plants would be captured and pumped underground. It has yet to be proven to work economically, but some experts think it could eventually play a major role.

Sales are still small overall, but they are rising fast.

The cars draw power at night from the electric grid and give off no pollution during the day as they move around town. They are inherently more efficient than gasoline cars and would represent an advance even if the power were generated by burning coal, but they will be far more important as the electric grid itself becomes greener through renewable power. The cars are improving so fast that some countries are already talking about banning the sale of gasoline cars after 2030.

It's just jargon for putting a price on pollution.

The greenhouse gases being released by human activity are often called "carbon emissions" for short. That is because two of the most important gases, carbon dioxide and methane, contain carbon. (Some other pollutants are lumped into the same category, even if they do not actually contain carbon.) When you hear about carbon taxes, carbon trading and so on, these are just shorthand descriptions of methods to put a price on emissions, which economists say is one of the most important steps society could take to limit them.

Start by sharing this with 50 of your friends.

Experts say the problem can only be solved by large-scale, collective action. Entire states and nations have to decide to clean up their energy systems, using every tool available and moving as quickly as they can. So the most important thing you can do is to exercise your rights as a citizen, speaking up and demanding change.

You can also take direct personal action to reduce your carbon footprint in simple ways that will save you money. You can plug leaks in your home insulation to save power, install a smart thermostat, switch to more efficient light bulbs, turn off unused lights, drive fewer miles by consolidating trips or taking public transit, waste less food, and eat less meat.

Taking one or two fewer plane rides per year can save as much in emissions as all the other actions combined. If you want to be at the cutting edge, you can look at buying an electric or hybrid car or putting solar panels on your roof. If your state has a competitive electricity market, you may be able to buy 100 percent green power.

Leading corporations, including large manufacturers like carmakers, are starting to demand clean energy for their operations. You can pay attention to company policies, support the companies taking the lead, and let the others know you expect them to do better.

These personal steps may be small in the scheme of things, but they can raise your own consciousness about the problem - and the awareness of the people around you. In fact, discussing this issue with your friends and family is one of the most meaningful things you can do.

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Good question! Keep 'em coming.

Produced by Gray Beltran and Rumsey Taylor.

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united nations framework convention on climate change

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Climate Change Is Complex. We've Got Answers to Your Questions.

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Both are accurate, but they mean different things. You can think of global warming as one type of climate change. The broader term covers changes beyond warmer temperatures, such as shifting rainfall patterns. President Trump has claimed that scientists stopped referring to global warming and started calling it climate change because "the weather has been so cold" in winter.

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Katrina. Sandy. Harvey. The debate over climate and hurricanes is getting louder and louder. - The Washington Post

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Katrina. Sandy. Harvey. The debate over climate and hurricanes is getting louder and louder. - The Washington Post

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Almost exactly 12 years ago, when Hurricane Katrina put much of New Orleans under water, it touched off a massive dispute among scientists about the relationship between hurricanes and global warming.

Now, it's happening again. Harvey, with its unprecedented rains, has spawned an urgent debate over whether this is what a changing climate looks like.

Yet while the argument following Katrina lacked any satisfying resolution, today we may be getting closer to answering questions about how a changing climate worsens hurricanes.

At least two things have changed in the intervening years. One is the availability of new analytical approaches and more powerful supercomputers.

"The methodological frameworks were very much in their infancy at the time of Katrina in 2005," said Noah Diffenbaugh, a Stanford climate researcher who performs climate change "attribution" studies, seeking to determine how the probability of various weather events has changed as a result of the warming of the climate.

There's another change. Today, despite recent charges from Environmental Protection Agency spokeswoman Liz Bowman that they are "engaging in attempts to politicize an ongoing tragedy," many researchers are more willing to simply say that Harvey's record rains were worse because of our hotter, wetter climate.

"Climate change worsened the impact of Hurricane Harvey," stated Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann bluntly, in a much-quoted Facebook post about the storm.
The climate-hurricane debate of yesteryear
Shortly before and after Katrina, several researchers published studies suggesting that more intense hurricanes were linked to rising ocean temperatures. That made sense: Hurricanes draw heat energy from the oceans and turn it into powerful winds and rain.

But there was a big problem: Data. You don't know how strong a hurricane is unless you can measure it, and hurricane measurement techniques are highly inconsistent around the globe and were less reliable in the past than they are today. Accordingly, other scientists questioned the ability to detect strong hurricane trends.

The tone at the time was quite cautious. Even the scientists arguing for a climate connection tended to underscore that they weren't talking about Katrina but, rather, about hurricanes in general.

Yet the context was hard to miss, as Katrina proved a devastating political event for President George W. Bush, whose administration had made a habit of sowing doubts about climate change.

The researchers also emphasized repeatedly that global warming doesn't cause individual storm events. They're products of a swarm of atmospheric and oceanic conditions - and what perhaps matters most is the broader pattern of winds that steer a given storm toward its landfall in a particular location.

And nobody - at least, at the time - seemed to be saying that these steering winds were being altered by climate change.
Superstorm Sandy shifts the narrative
The tone began to change when another major U.S. city was flooded by another suspicious storm.

In the case of Superstorm Sandy in 2012, the storm's particular path - a beeline toward New Jersey, rather than out to sea - was abnormal. Atlantic hurricanes often "recurve" and flow away from the United States as they travel farther northward.

Sandy did the opposite.

In one analysis, NASA's Timothy Hall and Columbia University's Adam Sobel found that Sandy's sharp turn toward New Jersey is expected to happen only once every 714 years, based on the history of Atlantic storms.

The result "implies either that the New York-New Jersey area simply experienced a very rare event (with climate change playing no significant role), or that a climate-change influence increased the probability of its occurrence," they wrote in a 2013 study on Sandy's angle of approach.

Some researchers, like Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University, suggested a potential climate role. Francis argued that the warming of the Arctic, at a much faster pace than the mid-latitudes, is slowing the jet stream and prompting extreme weather events when there's weak atmospheric flow. She specifically cited Sandy's strange behavior.

"We were just coming off of a record-smashing low sea-ice year in 2012," Francis told Climate Central in 2014. "The block that played such a key role in Sandy's 'weirdness' seemed like an amazing coincidence."

But other researchers strongly disputed Francis's jet stream idea - which continues to divide scientists even today.

Meanwhile, watching the floodwaters swamp New York, some observers began to make a relatively simple but resonant observation. Sea levels, they noted, are higher today than they were when similar storms affected New York in the past - and nobody really disputes that the warming of the planet is driving sea level rise.

That led to the inference that at least some of what Sandy threw at New York was in a sense, extra. And maybe that water made a difference.

As MIT's Kerry Emanuel, who published one of the key studies in the wake of Katrina, put it to The Post last week: "New York, when Sandy hit, the sea level was already about a foot higher than it was 100 years earlier. So if Sandy had hit in 1912, it probably would not have flooded Lower Manhattan."

Indeed, subsequent research found that the chances of a Sandy-style flood event are higher today and will only grow further as seas continue to rise.
Changing the burden of proof
Meanwhile, some scientists were questioning what they viewed as a default assumption that one must prove that a given storm is influenced by climate change - seeking to flip the question and, instead, suggest that all storms today are so influenced.

Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, has argued that storm thermodynamics - the heat and moisture that serve as fuel - are strongly climate-dependent. In particular, Trenberth argues that hurricanes and other storms will rain more today because the warmer atmosphere carries more moisture.

"The environment in which all weather events occur is not what it used to be," wrote Trenberth and his colleagues John Fasullo and Theodore Shepherd in 2015. "All storms, without exception, are different."

All these threads come together with Harvey. We have a storm that rapidly intensified over warm oceans and had an exceedingly odd track that led it to move very slowly, lingering in place amid a lack of strong atmospheric steering currents and dumping record rainfall.

Some researchers today are taking Trenberth's broad approach and simply highlighting that a warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor and, thus, suggesting that climate change worsened Harvey's rains.

"Harvey was not caused by climate change, yet its impacts - the storm surge, and especially the extreme rainfall - very likely worsened due to human-caused global warming," said Stefan Rahmstorf, a researcher with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, in a statement.

Rahmstorf said in a follow up email that this is just basic physics, citing the Clausius-Clapeyron equation, which shows that the atmosphere holds more water vapor when it is warmer, setting the stage for more rainfall.

"It is about 7% more water vapor per degree C of warming," he said. "The [equation] tends to be a good approximation for extreme rainfall events because they tend to occur with moisture-saturated air masses."
Enter the attributionists
But it would be considerably more powerful to say that because of the warming of the planet, a storm like Harvey was statistically more likely to occur - and give the odds. And scientists just might be on the cusp of doing that.

Such analysis requires an "attribution study," which often uses myriad runs of high-powered computer models to determine the odds of an event occurring with, and without, human-caused changes to the atmosphere. Attribution science has been evolving alongside the hurricane debate: One of the first such studies, published in 2004, examined an extreme and deadly 2003 European heat wave.

Such studies may allow researchers to say that some aspect of Harvey, such as its path or its rainfall, was more likely to occur in the current climate than in an unaltered one.

"I would actually be really surprised if you don't start seeing those kind of studies coming out within six to 10 weeks. My guess is it will be weeks, not months to years," said David Titley, a meteorologist at Penn State University who chaired a National Academy of Sciences report on the attribution studies in question.

Yet complex atmospheric and ocean phenomena such as hurricanes remain a difficulty in such studies, in part because of the computing power required. Heat waves are far easier to attribute to a warming climate in a statistical sense.

"Attribution is still a young science, and there have been big disagreements in the field," Columbia's Sobel said. "This is still the bleeding edge of what we can do."

Still, Stanford's Diffenbaugh agreed that before long - if they haven't begun already - scientists will be looking very closely at the Harvey event, based on its thermodynamics (storm intensity and rainfall) and its "dynamics," or the broader atmospheric flow factors that led the storm to stall.

Titley thinks climate analyses will try to suss out the likelihood of Harvey's track, just as occurred with Sandy. "The fact that nothing in the atmosphere was there to kick it out or shear it apart or do anything with it, really is this kind of worst-case scenario here," he said. "So the question going forward is: Are these situations going to be more likely or did we just get unlucky?"

But not all scientists agree that attribution studies are the way to go.

"I think they provide at best a limited view of the climate connections," said Penn State's Mann by email. "Simple physics (effect of [sea-level rise] on storm surge) and simple thermodynamics (i.e. Clausius-Clapeyron) are valid whether or not we can trust the models to get the specifics dynamical linkages between climate change and extreme weather events right (and I'm deeply skeptical the models are up to this task at present)."

In the meantime, watching the evolution of the debate over hurricanes and climate change, several things are clear. First, major storm events drive science. They force researchers to ask questions, and the ensuing inquiry improves our answers.

The second, meanwhile, is that we have had devastating flooding of a major city from a hurricane event in each of the last three presidencies, even as the climate hurricane debate has grown steadily more insistent. At this point, we surely have the right to wonder, just as scientists themselves are already doing, whether the burden of proof has shifted.

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Katrina. Sandy. Harvey. The debate over climate and hurricanes is getting louder and louder.

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Almost exactly 12 years ago, when Hurricane Katrina put much of New Orleans under water, it touched off a massive dispute among scientists about the relationship between hurricanes and global warming. Now, it's happening again. Harvey, with its unprecedented rains, has spawned an urgent debate over whether this is what a changing climate looks like.

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Clues Found That Earth May Have a Thermostat Set to “Habitable” - Eos

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Clues Found That Earth May Have a Thermostat Set to “Habitable” - Eos

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Clues Found That Earth May Have a Thermostat Set to "Habitable" - Eos

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Weathering of rocks can control Earth's temperature over geologic timescales, new geochemical data suggest.

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Houston Fears Flooding from Climate Change

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Houston Fears Flooding from Climate Change

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Check the date of the article...

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Sam Brody is not a real estate agent, but when his friends want to move home they get in touch to ask for advice. He is a flood impact expert in Houston - and he has plenty of work to keep him busy.

The Texas metropolis has more casualties and property loss from floods than any other locality in the US, according to data stretching back to 1960 that Brody researched with colleagues. And, he said: "Where the built environment is a main force exacerbating the impacts of urban flooding, Houston is number one and it's not even close."

Near the Gulf coast, Houston is also at annual risk from hurricanes: it is now into the start of the 2017 season, which runs from June to November. Ike, the last hurricane to hit the Houston region, caused $34bn in damage and killed 112 people across several states in September 2008.

There is little hope the situation is going to get better any time soon. Earlier this month, days after Donald Trump announced the US will withdraw from the Paris accord on climate change, a new report warned that rare US floods will become the norm if emissions are not cut.

Brody, a professor in the department of marine sciences at Texas A&M University's Galveston campus, said the requests for help in Houston from people moving homes inspired him to create a forthcoming web tool so that people can type in an address and get a risk score.

"If you can see your crime statistics, shouldn't you be able to see your flood risk also? And other risks as well, human-induced risks?" he said. The site will be named Buyers Be-Where.

In May 2015, eight people, many of them motorists, died in Harris County when a storm dropped 11in of rain in parts of the city in 10 hours.

Last year, another six lost their lives in an April storm that hurled 240bn gallons of water at the Houston area. An inch of rain fell over the county in only five minutes, with a peak of 16.7in in 12 hours.

The events damaged thousands of homes, turning major freeways into canals and piling up vehicles as if they were in a junkyard. The 2016 flood cost an estimated $2.7bn in losses and prompted more than 1,800 high water rescues.

Significant rains have always been a feature of life in south-east Texas. What bothers Brody and local environmentalists is the extent to which human activity is making things worse.

"Houston is situated in a low-lying coastal area with poorly draining soils and is subject to heavy rainfall events and storm surge events, which makes it very prone to flooding. And the climate is changing. In Galveston Bay the sea level is rising. We know the area is experiencing more heavy downpours," Brody said.

"It pales in comparison with the other driving force, which is the built environment. If you're going to put 4 million people in this flood-vulnerable area in a way which involves ubiquitous application of impervious surfaces, you're going to get flooding."

In other words: there is a lot of concrete in Houston. In 2000, 4.7 million people lived in the Houston metropolitan area. Now the population is about 6.5 million. While efforts are under way to densify and improve public transport in the urban core, much of the growth has been suburban, where houses are big and cheap and commuters drive long distances on some of the world's widest freeways. The city keeps loosening its belt: a third ring-road cuts through exurbs some 30 miles from downtown, spurring more expansion.

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Severe flooding in the Houston area.
Photograph: Bob Levey/Getty Images

To the west, idyllically named middle-class subdivisions sprout on former farmland, served by new retail complexes and multi-lane roads. Here, 3,500 sq ft homes can be bought for less than $400,000, helping to explain the region's population explosion. But it may be coming at a price - one paid downstream.

The Bayou City's vein-like network of creeks and rivers are one of its defining features, but heavy rains turn them from subdued to seething. The Buffalo Bayou's light brown waters meander 50 miles from west of the city through downtown to large bays in the east. The threat of catastrophic overflowing is mitigated by two dams built in the 1940s that the army corps of engineers has classified as having an "extremely high risk" of failing and is now repairing.

The danger is lessened, too, by the natural defence of the western plains - but here, water-retaining grasses are being replaced by non-absorbent surfaces, which encourage water to travel downstream. Brody calculates that each new square metre of pavement in Houston on average adds $4,000 worth of flood damage.

We may not be able to stop flooding but we ought to be able to better manage it

Founded in 1992, the Katy Prairie Conservancy, a not-for-profit land trust, has a field office in bucolic land an hour's drive from the skyscraping oil industry headquarters dotting central Houston. The Katy Prairie was once estimated at 500,000 to 750,000 acres, before Houston boomed. The Conservancy owns about 14,000 acres - an area roughly the size of Manhattan. It helps protect another 6,000, quietly working to shield fields from sprawl in a city and state better known for damaging the environment through oil and gas production than for preserving its natural resources.

"We may not be able to stop flooding but we ought to be able to better manage it," said Mary Anne Piacentini, the executive director. "Our grasses are great water-holding reservoirs. Initial studies that we were doing with the Harris County Flood Control District show that our prairie grasses can hold up to about 8in of water."

Her colleague, Wesley Newman, likens tall grass prairies to an upside-down rainforest: the grass can grow to 6ft to 8ft above ground and two or three times as much below. "We've come to realise that the grassland, the tall grass prairie, is maybe even more important than the wetlands," Piacentini said. "The more that we can restore, the more likely it is that we will be able to increase the water-holding capacity of what we do, and that affects directly downstream Houston."

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'We may not be able to stop flooding but we ought to be able to better manage it.' Photograph: David J Phillip/AP

Inside Houston's second ring road, 30 miles east, a photo album sat on a table in Dean Bixler's living room. It was not filled with happy family portraits, but murky images of the flood-ravaged rooms of his house, with sofas elevated on chairs above coffee-coloured water.

The 60-year-old bought it in 1996, not imagining that his renovation budget would ever need to take the cost of pumps into account. Bixler said his house, built in 1960, has flooded three times since 2009, submerging his long front lawn and invading his home. "You could not see any grass. That's a lot of frickin' water," Bixler said. In 2015, the repairs took about five months. In 2016, his flood-proofing measures kept water infiltration to an inch and a half.

Bixler is a member of Residents Against Flooding, a group that last year filed a lawsuit against the city and a local infrastructure authority alleging that poorly mitigated developments are causing hundreds of homes to flood.

"The truth is that most of the flooding in Houston is manmade," said Ed Browne, another member, pointing out that many people who get flooded, Bixler included, are not in the 100-year floodplain - an area calculated to have a 1% annual chance of flooding.

But Bixler's part of town has in the past decade been extensively redeveloped, with new shopping malls, office blocks, homes and apartment complexes, many designed, critics say, with flood-control strategies such as elevation that appear to prioritise self-protection with little overall plan as to what happens to the diverted water.

It is a worrying vision of the future: stronger and more frequent storms with fewer natural barriers, while rapid and haphazard urban development with limited oversight creates new at-risk zones or worsens drainage in known problem areas.

The Harris County flood control district did not respond to requests for comment; its executive director, Russ Poppe, told the Houston Press last year that there are regulations to stop builders from increasing flood risks and that it is difficult to protect against exceptionally violent storms.

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'The truth is that most of the flooding in Houston is manmade.' Photograph: Larry W Smith/EPA

Disaster movie-style threat to Houston Ship Channel

While residents battle for local improvements, there are predictions worthy of a disaster movie for what could happen if a powerful hurricane barrels directly into Houston's industrial east. "If we get 20ft plus of water up the Houston Ship Channel it will be apocalyptic. I think all of us that have studied hurricanes are absolutely petrified about a big storm flooding the Houston Ship Channel and basically causing a number of those storage tanks to become unmoored and releasing their contents," said Jim Blackburn, an environmental attorney and co-director of the Severe Storm Prediction, Education, and Evacuation from Disasters (SSPEED) Center at Rice University.

"There's a lot of very dangerous materials that are generally handled, all things considered, fairly well, but they're not designed against 20ft floods and if we have that it's just going to be an incredibly bleak situation," he said.

The coastal area from Galveston to Houston is home to several hundred thousand people, Nasa's Johnson Space Center, the US's second-biggest seaport in terms of total tonnage, some of the nation's largest refineries and its biggest petrochemical complex.

Every year we put more people and critical assets in harm's way. We keep rolling the dice and the stakes become higher

It is not lost on environmental activists that those refineries, as part of the fossil fuels industry, may be imperiled by extreme weather linked to climate change.

As a ProPublica/Texas Tribune investigation pointed out last year, had Ike been a little stronger and not changed course at the last minute in 2008, Blackburn's nightmare scenario might have become reality.

According to the SSPEED Center, a 24ft storm surge along the Ship Channel would cause about 90m gallons of crude oil and chemical substances to rush into neighbourhoods and Galveston Bay - an event that a 2015 report claims "could easily become the worst environmental disaster in US history".

To say nothing of the economic impact on the region and the nation - a lengthy shutdown of south-east Texas's facilities would be felt all over the country as products such as gasoline and jet fuel would become scarcer and more expensive.

A multibillion-dollar coastal barrier has long been on the wish list - but is far from being realised, since there is as of yet no consensus over the design, implementation and funding. "If you look historically at major hurricane enters Galveston Bay every 15-20 years, so it's going to happen," said Brody, the professor.

"It is something that keeps me awake at night every June that rolls around, hurricane season, because it's not if, it's just when - and every year we put more people and critical assets in harm's way. We keep rolling the dice and the stakes become higher."

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Houston fears climate change will cause catastrophic flooding: 'It's not if, it's when'

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Sam Brody is not a real estate agent, but when his friends want to move home they get in touch to ask for advice. He is a flood impact expert in Houston - and he has plenty of work to keep him busy.

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Another piece of evidence...

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YUKON DELTA NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, Alaska - The Arctic is warming about twice as fast as other parts of the planet, and even here in sub-Arctic Alaska the rate of warming is high. Sea ice and wildlife habitat are disappearing; higher sea levels threaten coastal native villages.

But to the scientists from Woods Hole Research Center who have come here to study the effects of climate change, the most urgent is the fate of permafrost, the always-frozen ground that underlies much of the state.

Starting just a few feet below the surface and extending tens or even hundreds of feet down, it contains vast amounts of carbon in organic matter - plants that took carbon dioxide from the atmosphere centuries ago, died and froze before they could decompose. Worldwide, permafrost is thought to contain about twice as much carbon as is currently in the atmosphere.

Once this ancient organic material thaws, microbes convert some of it to carbon dioxide and methane, which can flow into the atmosphere and cause even more warming. Scientists have estimated that the process of permafrost thawing could contribute as much as 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit to global warming over the next several centuries, independent of what society does to reduce emissions from burning fossil fuels and other activities.

In Alaska, nowhere is permafrost more vulnerable than here, 350 miles south of the Arctic Circle, in a vast, largely treeless landscape formed from sediment brought down by two of the state's biggest rivers, the Yukon and the Kuskokwim. Temperatures three feet down into the frozen ground are less than half a degree below freezing. This area could lose much of its permafrost by midcentury.

That, said Max Holmes, senior scientist and deputy director of the research center, "has all kinds of consequences both locally for this region, for the animals and the people who live here, as well as globally."

"It's sobering to think of this magnificent landscape and how fundamentally it can change over a relatively short time period," he added.

But on this wide, flat tundra, it takes a practiced eye to see how Alaska is thawing from below.

At one of the countless small lakes that pepper the region, chunks of shoreline that include what had been permafrost have calved off toward the water.

Nearby, across a spongy bed of mosses and lichens, a small boggy depression most likely formed when the ice in the top layers of the permafrost below it melted to water.

In July, the Woods Hole scientists, along with 13 undergraduate and graduate students working on projects of their own, set up a temporary field station on a nameless lake 60 miles northwest of Bethel, which with a population of 6,000 is the largest town in the region. They drilled permafrost cores with a power auger, took other sediment and water samples and embedded temperature probes in the frozen ground. Later, back in the lab at Woods Hole, they began the process of analyzing the samples for carbon content and nutrients.

The goal is to better understand how thawing permafrost affects the landscape and, ultimately, how much and what mix of greenhouse gases is released.

"In order to know how much is lost, you have to know how much is there," said Sue Natali, a Woods Hole scientist and permafrost expert.

Even in colder northern Alaska, where permafrost in some parts of the North Slope extends more than 2,100 feet below the surface, scientists are seeing stark changes. Vladimir E. Romanovsky, a permafrost researcher at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, said that temperatures at a depth of 65 feet have risen by 3 degrees Celsius (about 5.5 degrees Fahrenheit) over decades.

Near-surface changes have been even greater. At one northern site, he said, permafrost temperatures at shallow depths have climbed from minus 8 degrees Celsius to minus 3.

"Minus 3 is not that far from zero," Dr. Romanovsky said. If emissions and warming continue at the same rate, he said, near-surface temperatures will rise above freezing around the middle of the century.

There is plenty of debate among scientists about when and how much of Alaska's permafrost will thaw. And there is no doubt that thawing of the full depth of permafrost would take millenniums.

But Dr. Romanovsky said that his and others' work shows that permafrost "is not as stable as people thought."

In addition to greenhouse gas emissions, thawing wreaks havoc on infrastructure, causing slumping of land when ice loses volume as it turns to water.

The main road in Bethel, where average temperatures have risen about 4 degrees Fahrenheit since the mid-20th century, is more of a washboard than a thoroughfare because of shifting ground. Building foundations in Bethel move and crack as well. Some roads, airport runways and parking areas have to be reinforced with liquid-filled pipes that transfer heat out of the permafrost to keep the ground from slumping.

The thawing of permafrost is a gradual process. Ground is fully frozen in winter, and begins to thaw from the top down as air temperatures rise in spring. As average temperatures increase over years, this thawed, or active, layer can increase in depth.

At the field station, the researchers are especially interested in how wildfires affect the permafrost. Because burning removes some of the vegetation that acts as insulation, the theory is that burning should cause permafrost to thaw more.

Parts of the tundra here burned in the 1970s and in the summer of 2015, so the researchers took cores from both burned and unburned areas. Scientists wrestled with the bulky power auger as its stainless steel tube worked its way into the hard permafrost. Cores - often containing thin layers of solid ice - were labeled, packed in a cooler and sent by helicopter to a freezer in Bethel.

Thawing permafrost underneath or at the edge of a lake can cause it to drain like a leaky bathtub. Thawing elsewhere can bring about small elevation changes that can in turn lead to changes in water flow through the landscape, drying out some parts of the tundra and turning others into bogs.

Beyond the local effects on plant and animal life, the landscape changes can have an important climate change impact, by altering the mix of carbon dioxide and methane that is emitted. Although methane does not persist in the atmosphere for as long as carbon dioxide, it has a far greater heat-trapping ability and can contribute to more rapid warming.

So the researchers devote much of their time to studying the flow of water and the carbon and nutrients it contains.

"It's one of the big questions to tackle - what's wet and dry now, and what will be wet and dry in the future," Dr. Natali said. If the decomposing permafrost is wet, there will be less oxygen available to the microbes, so they will produce more methane. If the permafrost is dry, the decomposition will lead to more carbon dioxide.

Estimates vary on how much carbon is currently released from thawing permafrost worldwide, but by one calculation emissions over the rest of the century could average about 1.5 billion tons a year, or about the same as current annual emissions from fossil-fuel burning in the United States.

Already, thawing permafrost and warmer temperatures are being blamed for rising carbon emissions in the Alaskan tundra, both here and farther north. In a study earlier this year, researchers found that bacterial decomposition of thawed permafrost, as well as carbon dioxide produced by living vegetation, continues later into the fall because freezing of the surface is delayed.

The rise in emissions has been so significant, the researchers found, that Alaska may be shifting from a sink, or storehouse, of carbon, to a net source.

Dr. Holmes said that shift was not surprising given the climate trend, and he would expect that sub-Arctic parts of Siberia, Canada and other areas with permafrost may be undergoing similar changes.

"There's a massive amount of carbon that's in the ground, that's built up slowly over thousands and thousands of years," he said.

"It's been in a freezer, and that freezer is now turning into a refrigerator."

Correction August 23, 2017

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to an estimate of the amount of carbon released from thawing permafrost worldwide. It is 1.5 billion tons a year averaged over the remainder of the century, not 1.5 billions tons a year currently.

Correction August 25, 2017

An earlier version of this article misspelled, in one instance, the surname of a permafrost researcher at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. He is Vladimir E. Romanovsky, not Ramonovsky.

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YUKON DELTA NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, Alaska - The Arctic is warming about twice as fast as other parts of the planet, and even here in sub-Arctic Alaska the rate of warming is high. Sea ice and wildlife habitat are disappearing; higher sea levels threaten coastal native villages.

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The National Climate Report

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1. It's hot out there.

It is getting warmer everywhere, but in the contiguous United States, the West is warming the fastest. While temperatures in the country (excluding Alaska and Hawaii) have increased an average of 1.2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1900, the Southwest and the Northwest, as well as the Northern Great Plains, have seen a temperature increase of 1.5 degrees or more. A degree and a half may not seem like much, but even slight changes in temperature can have widespread effects.

How average annual temperatures have changed

Since the first half of the 20th century

The report said that heat waves and droughts had reached record intensities in some parts of the country. But the Dust Bowl of the 1930s remains the benchmark for heat and drought in American history, by virtue of the area involved and how long it lasted.

2. Wetter hurricanes in the East.

While it is not certain that the frequency of intense hurricanes will increase, hurricanes that do occur will bring more rainfall than ever and could potentially be more destructive.

3. Bad news for California.

Warming will probably bring further reductions in winter and spring snowpack, which the state depends on for much of its water supply. If greenhouse gas emissions remain high and few steps are undertaken to better manage water resources, chronic long-lasting shortages - or hydrological drought - are possible by 2100.

4. When it rains, it pours more.

Americans are already experiencing more extreme precipitation. The amount of precipitation that falls in the heaviest storms is higher across the country, when storms from the last three decades are compared to storms from 1900 to 1960. The change has been highest in the Northeast, where 27 percent more rain falls in the worst storms.

5. Flooding related to sea-level rise is a problem already.

Tidal flooding that is already occurring in places like Miami and Norfolk, Va., will get worse throughout the century and affect cities on both coasts. By the end of the century, for example, parts of Charleston, S.C., may flood at high tide nearly every day. Low-lying parts of San Francisco are also extremely vulnerable, too, and are expected to have frequent flooding.

6. Some areas will suffer more from rising seas.

Sea-level rise is expected to be worse in the Northeast and along the Gulf of Mexico, in part because the land in those regions is naturally subsiding. It is expected to be less of a problem in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. Ocean circulation patterns, salinity and other factors can also influence how large the sea-level increase will be.

7. El Niño isn't forever.

Recurring natural shifts in atmospheric patterns can affect temperature and precipitation from months to years. The recent El Niño, for example, contributed to making 2015 and 2016 the warmest years on record. But such natural variability, the report said, has little influence on global or regional climate trends over periods of a decade or more.

8. Humans are to blame.

The federal report left no doubt as to responsibility for a warming climate: "It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid 20th century." There are no convincing alternative explanations supported by the observational evidence, the report said.

9. Be ready for surprises in the future.

The report said that through greenhouse gas emissions and widespread deforestation, humans were conducting an "unprecedented experiment" with the climate system. Although climate modeling has gotten more sophisticated, no model can capture all the elements of the earth's complex climate. The report warned there was a "significant possibility" of climate surprises in the future, either compound events, where two or more extreme events occur simultaneously, or tipping point events where some threshold in the climate system is crossed. The more the climate is changed - the more emissions continue or increase - the greater the risk of such surprises, the report said.

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9 Takeaways From the National Climate Report

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1. It's hot out there. It is getting warmer everywhere, but in the contiguous United States, the West is warming the fastest. While temperatures in the country (excluding Alaska and Hawaii) have increased an average of 1.2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1900, the Southwest and the Northwest, as well as the Northern Great Plains, have seen a temperature increase of 1.5 degrees or more.

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The warming of the Earth's climate is indisputable.

A new international climate change report, prepared by 450 scientists from more than 60 countries, has published trends from thousands of data sets that - across the board - present a clear-cut picture of a warming world.

Led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the report revealed that heat-trapping gases, global temperatures, ocean heat content, and sea levels reached record or near-record highs in 2016. It is the 27th version of the report, titled State of the Climate in 2016, and is being published as a special 280-page supplement in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

NOAA released the report documenting irrefutable evidence of global warming, even as President Trump and high-level members of his administration have expressed skepticism about the phenomenon, especially the human role.

Five indicators from the report, in particular, offer a particularly compelling illustration of the changing composition of the Earth's atmosphere and the warming that has occurred in lockstep.
1. Concentrations of carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping greenhouse gas, are rising and hit a record high in 2016
2. Global surface temperatures are rising and hit a record high in 2016
3. The number of extremely hot days are increasing worldwide.
4. Sea levels are rising and hit a record high in 2016
5. Mountain glaciers are retreating

Supplementing these charts, Climate Central, the nonprofit science communication firm in Princeton, N.J., created these visuals illustrating some additional key findings from the report:
1. The United States had its second-warmest year on record
2. The 10 hottest years on record for the planet have occurred since 1998
3. Ocean temperatures in 2016 are rising and hit a record high in 2016

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Analysis | It's unambiguous and definitive. These five charts prove that the planet is heating up.

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The warming of the Earth's climate is indisputable. A new international climate change report, prepared by 450 scientists from more than 60 countries, has published trends from thousands of data sets that - across the board - present a clear-cut picture of a warming world.

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Climate Change Threatens Tropical Coffee Crop

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Climate Change Threatens Tropical Coffee Crop

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Nnnoooooo!

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GOLETA, Calif. - There is a new crop growing in Southern California's famous avocado groves - coffee.

About two dozen farms between San Diego and here, just outside Santa Barbara, are nurturing coffee bushes under the canopies of old avocado trees, in what may be the first serious effort in the United States to commercialize coffee grown outside Hawaii, home of Kona coffees.

"When people hear I'm growing coffee, they typically make a face and say something like, 'Well, how good can coffee grown in California be?'" said Jay Ruskey, the owner of Good Land Organics, who is widely regarded as the father of the state's nascent coffee business.

The farmers are hoping to capitalize on a variety of changing factors abroad and here, including the aging of California's avocado trees, which are producing less fruit.

The avocado growers face major disruptions in their business, including increased competition from Mexican imports, less access to water and rising real estate prices, all of which are forcing them to rethink that crop. But thanks to Mr. Ruskey, they have realized that their sprawling avocado trees provide perfect shade for high-quality coffee bushes.

One variety of Mr. Ruskey's beans, Pacamara, emits an earthy scent like the smell of California dirt and new plants in spring. His Geisha beans have a light and fruity flavor with low acidity. Bourbon finishes with a chocolate taste.

As growers like him consider the move into growing coffee beans, they are eyeing machinery that can harvest the beans, which would reduce labor costs, as well as a contraption called a demucilager that mechanically strips coffee berry skin and pulp off the beans, rather than using water to clean them.

And they see more and more American consumers willing to spend $8 or $12 for a cup of joe, which would offset their high costs of production.

At the same time, climate change threatens to damage the coffee crop in the tropical highlands that produce nearly all the world's beans, potentially opening up a lucrative opportunity in the $20 billion export market for beans. Last year, some small Brazilian coffee farmers lost 90 percent of their crop to drought and heat, and similar conditions in Sumatra in western Indonesia made it uneconomical for many farmers there to harvest what little crop they had.

Mr. Ruskey has grown coffee on his farm for more than a decade, but it is only over the last three or four years, as his coffee started winning high scores in taste tests, that other farmers have begun to try their hands at growing it. Still, Doug Welsh, roastmaster at Peet's, notes that the number of coffee bushes growing in California today is 30 times what it was 13 years ago when Mr. Ruskey started, or about 14,000 plants.

"We probably roast more coffee at Peet's in one day than is being produced on all the farms growing coffee here, but I'm looking at this as a cup half full," Mr. Welsh said. "It's early days, but I think it could at least get to be as big as the Hawaiian coffee business."

(There are roughly 800 coffee farms in the Hawaiian Islands producing as much as nine million pounds of unroasted beans a year; California produces only hundreds of pounds. Globally, 12 billion pounds of coffee are consumed each year.)

These growers aim to appeal to the premium coffee market. More than half the adult coffee drinkers in America reported drinking a specialty coffee daily, according to the National Coffee Association, or roughly twice as many as in 2010.

"People are shifting away from the way my grandparents drank coffee, which was at breakfast and made from whatever coffee was on sale - it was simply fuel," said Peter Giuliano, chief research officer at the Specialty Coffee Association. "They're willing to pay for something unusual."

A pound of dried green specialty coffee beans can sell for as much as $120 in today's market, according to Andy Mullins, a retired technology executive who has planted coffee on his property east of Santa Barbara. "You should be able to produce a pound for under $30, which is a superb profit margin," Mr. Mullins said. "The only places that see better margins than that are software companies."

Mr. Mullins is not a coffee drinker, but he caught the bug after visiting Mr. Ruskey's farm, which cascades down a mountainside some 650 feet above the Pacific Ocean. Dragon fruit trees and finger lime bushes are interspersed among cherimoya and avocado trees, and each fruit crop is enlisted to help others grow. The avocado trees are the workhorses, acting as trellises for passion fruit vines and providing shade for the coffee bushes.

His profits from growing those unusual crops has helped persuade other farmers to take on the risk and expense of growing coffee. It can take as many as four years for coffee plants to get established, said Mark Gaskell, a farm adviser in the University of California system, meaning a grower must make a significant upfront investment before seeing any return.

In addition, coffee is labor-intensive. Many of the coffee growers here are looking to Brazil, where coffee harvesting machines have replaced the people who picked and processed coffee, for ideas about how to reduce labor costs.

"The way they do it there would remind you of how cotton or almonds are harvested, highly mechanized and technical," Mr. Welsh said, though he noted that such machinery tends to operate on large, flat spaces that are very different from coastal California's mountainous terrain.

Many California avocado groves are aging, confronting their owners with a variety of challenges - and coffee offers one sort of transition.

Avocado trees were popular because they are easy to grow, requiring water, a little fertilizer and almost no maintenance. But water is now a more expensive resource, and because avocado trees are traditionally not pruned, older trees have dense foliage that discourages fruiting.

That was the problem Mr. Mullins faced when he retired to a home in the Santa Barbara area. "The home we purchased came with four acres of avocado trees, and we thought, Hey, that could be an interesting thing to get involved with," he said.

But he soon discovered that his avocado trees were 30 years old and not so productive. His options were to cut them back severely to regenerate growth, replace them or prune them, each of which would require significant expense and put the grove out of production for at least two years.

So Mr. Mullins began looking into what's known as high-density planting, and that led him to Mr. Ruskey, who is widely known among such growers. Good Land Organics looks more like a jungle than the cherimoya grove it was when Mr. Ruskey's family bought the property 27 years ago.

He has planted cactuses that produce dragon fruit and avocado trees among the cherimoyas, and everything is knitted together with passion fruit vines. Their mingled roots help preserve soil, and their foliage creates a shade that helps conserve water while providing just the right amount of dappled sunshine for coffee bushes.

So after spending some time at Good Land, Mr. Mullins and his wife, Linda, planted coffee in their avocado grove. They are growing Geisha, a Panamanian varietal that produces some of the world's most expensive coffee beans, and Caturra, a Colombian coffee that is the workhorse of the specialty coffee business.

Willem Boot, a consultant to the coffee industry, said that in many ways, the climate along California's southern coast was ideal for coffee. "You have colder nights and warmer days pretty consistently, and the temperature rarely gets close to freezing," Mr. Boot said.

Such weather patterns allow coffee berries to mature slowly, which is the key to producing high-quality coffee. "Some of Jay's coffees are truly excellent and can succeed in the specialty market," he said. The farm's Typica, a centuries-old Arabica variety, "is really great."

In 2015, Mr. Ruskey took some of his exotic fruits and coffee berries to Re:co, the coffee industry equivalent of TED conferences. "It put coffee in the context of fruit," Mr. Giuliano said. "Very few people in the world get to taste a coffee berry," he said, but when they do, it's easy to understand what makes the seeds inside, which become coffee beans, special.

A year earlier, Coffee Review, a trade publication, had given Good Land's Caturra coffee a score of 91 out of 100, and depending on the roast, brew and time of harvest, the farm's coffees have scored from the mid-80s to the low 90s on other quality tests.

"There's no question that Jay has proved good coffee can be grown in California," Mr. Giuliano said.

Jason Mraz, a Grammy-winning singer and songwriter known for his hit "The Remedy," expects to produce his first significant coffee crop in about two years. "I started my career in a coffee house, and I love the coffee culture," Mr. Mraz said. "I knew right away that California coffee could be special."

So two years ago, he and his farm crew planted some 2,500 coffee bushes among the avocado groves on the 1,700 acres he farms near San Diego. Each plant's roots had to be caged to protect them from gophers. The bushes were caged above ground, too, and then wrapped to insulate and protect their leaves - just planting them took three months.

Today, Mr. Mraz said, the bushes are waist high and producing a few coffee berries. Only a handful were lost, mostly to gophers, coyotes and wind.

He gets a variety of reactions when he tells people about his coffee venture, he said.

"In the 1960s, people didn't think you could grow wine grapes in California, either," Mr. Mraz said. "I like to let the coffee deniers I meet here know that not only is coffee growing well in California, it also has its own flavor profile - and right now, it's one of the rarest coffees in the world."

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GOLETA, Calif. - There is a new crop growing in Southern California's famous avocado groves - coffee. About two dozen farms between San Diego and here, just outside Santa Barbara, are nurturing coffee bushes under the canopies of old avocado trees, in what may be the first serious effort in the United States to commercialize coffee grown outside Hawaii, home of Kona coffees.

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The northernmost village in Greenland sits just shy of 78 degrees north latitude - deep in the Arctic - yet during the summer, meltwater is everywhere. It flows in small rivulets and larger streams, past multicolored houses built against a sloping hill and down to the Inglefield Bredning, as it is called in Danish - a broad body of water at the confluence of several fjords.

Since the Inugguit people arrived in this village in 1953, life has been focused on hunting in and around this gulf, a summer habitat for narwhals, the rare whales with long, spearlike tusks that give them a mythic quality. In winter, the six-mile-wide body of water freezes solid enough to drive a car on; in summer, it is choked with enormous icebergs from nearby glaciers. Fragments of ice wash ashore along the beach here or loudly tumble in the shallows with the tides.

Traditionally, the inhabitants of this town of 630 would harpoon narwhals from kayaks in the summer and then in the winter use dog sleds to travel across the ice to hunt seals, walruses, polar bears and other marine mammals. They voyaged many miles, up and down the coast. Even today, Qaanaaq's residents collectively own hundreds of dogs, chained to nearly every home, it seems, and constantly howling.

But the age-old Inugguit lifestyle is changing fast as the climate warms, disrupting long-held patterns and possibilities and forcing economic challenges as a traditional hunting culture weighs new industries such as fishing and even tourism.

Qaanaaq has the trappings of modernity - a hotel, retirement home, diesel power plant, museum, church, school - but it is extremely remote. In general, Greenland is heavily subsidized by Denmark under a self-government arrangement, receiving nearly $540 million in 2015 from the European nation.

"Today, you don't raise boys to be a hunter from when they were small," said Jens Danielsen, the village's municipal leader, who spoke in Inuktun - a Greenlandic dialect spoken by only 700 people worldwide. (Navarana Sorensen, a villager who picked up English in Denmark and Canada, partly translated and partly paraphrased his words.)

"Now you tell them, you have to get a better education by going to school," he told two journalists from The Washington Post who visited the village late last summer. "That's how the lifestyle has changed a lot."

Danielsen said hunting patterns have been strongly altered by environmental changes. In the 1980s and 1990s, he said, the ice in the fjord would be safe to travel upon by mid-October every year. Today, he said, sometimes that deep freeze doesn't come until mid-December. It's no longer safe, he added, to take sleds out to the islands at the mouth of the fjord to hunt for walruses.

"Earlier, the hunters, they can just look at the weather and see how it is going to be the next few days, so I can go out," he said. "But today, you can't do that anymore, because the change of the weather happens from day to day, or from hour to hour."

Threats climatic and cultural

What's happening here is paralleled by the experiences of native villages in coastal Alaska, where people are being forced to consider relocation as the erosion of protective sea ice exposes them to the whims of powerful ocean waves and storms.

But the Inugguit are staring down the prospect of a second disruption within 65 years. Until 1953, they lived about 80 miles south of here in the shadow of Mount Dundas, a dramatic plateau rising from a peninsula at the tip of Greenland's many glacier-lined fjords.

In the depths of the Cold War, the Inugguit were removed from their ancestral village, known to them as Uummannaq, to make way for expansion of a U.S. air base. The United States built the military base, Thule Air Base, with the permission of Denmark, which then held colonial control of Greenland. The 116 villagers eventually resettled to Qaanaaq - where a painting of Mount Dundas still hangs in a municipal meeting room of the settlement.

Many villagers believe they were treated unfairly, even though they received new supplies and housing in Qaanaaq when they were relocated and the Danish authorities built facilities such as the school and power station.

[ As one of Greenland's largest ice shelves shrinks, a once-doubtful scientist has come around to the role of climate change. ]

And now, when it comes to climate, it'snot just the changing patterns of ice in the Inglefield Bredning. It's a host of other changes - from the arrival of mosquitoes to increasing landslide and flood dangers from the melting of the Qaanaaq ice cap, which sits on the bluff above the village.

The encroaching problems include mercury polluting the marine life that is their food staple.

Rune Dietz, an environmental scientist and marine mammal expert from Aarhus University in Denmark, was in Qaanaaq last summer to research this latest crisis for the village. High levels of mercury, which trace back to the burning of coal across the world, accumulate in the flesh of narwhals - exposing villagers to the dangerous neurotoxin.

"The mercury loads here are the highest in any part of the Arctic," Dietz said. "We've seen it in the polar bears here and in Lancaster Sound. We've seen it in the ringed seals. And if you look at the population, then the mercury loads here are by far higher than any other Inuit or the Indian tribes, or other indigenous or nonindigenous populations."

The changes are climatic but also economic and cultural. At least one observer of the Inugguit has suggested that environmental changes, as they reverberate through the community, could threaten the existence of their language.

The dialect here, Inuktun, has been described by researchers as having the closest similarities with ways of speaking on Baffin Island, southward across the water in northern Canada. It has no dictionary or standardized spelling of words. It's spoken only by the residents of Qaanaaq and those living in a few hunting settlements nearby, according to Stephen Leonard, an Oxford linguistic anthropologist who lived with the Inugguit for a year in 2010-2011.

The language includes words as long as 50 letters and has multiple ways of saying things such as "seal," Leonard noted. There is a word for "seal that has crawled up onto the ice" and another for "seal that has come up to breathe," he wrote.

Leonard fears that as climate change and technological incursions from the outside world threaten Inugguit culture with destabilizing changes, the language, too, could prove vulnerable.

"It is clear to me that the link between environmental and cultural vulnerability is genuine and that the two are interwoven," he wrote.

Increased isolation

While a melting Arctic has given wealthy tourists the opportunity to take a cruise through the Northwest Passage, it has further isolated people here. For a culture used to traveling atop the ice, it has been constraining, not liberating.

Amain winter means of travel beyond the village has been lost because the Politiken glacier, located across the Inglefield Bredning from Qaanaaq, is no longer usable. It used to be possible to travel across the ice, up over the glacier and on to the next fjord by dog sled.

"That used to be the highway going southward to Moriusaq," Dietz said. "You can't travel that way anymore, because the glacier has retracted."

Meanwhile, air travel in and out from the village's small airstrip, by helicopter or plane, can be very expensive. Air Greenland operates a twice-weekly, two-stop route that ends in Qaanaaq from the far more southern town of Kangerlussuaq, but recently quoted summer prices were more than $1,000 each way. (People arriving from abroad fly from Copenhagen to Kangerlussuaq.)

"Normal people, hunter families and things like that, they cannot afford to travel even in our country because it is too expensive," Sorensen said.

An unlikely problem: water

But of course, the outside world has its pull, which is another force working against this community.

It is difficult to get those who have traveled abroad or to other parts of Greenland to return and stay here for good, said Arruttaq Qujaukitsoq, the director of tourism, hunting, fishing and labor in Qaanaaq.

"We don't want them to stay away, because they have things we can use here, like the education," he said, also in translation. "But there's no job for them, even if they're educated, and therefore many of them, they still stay away."

Statistics Greenland shows a slow decline in Qaanaaq's population over the past decade from 660 to 630 people and a faster decline in the population of the outlying settlements, such as the hunting village of Siorapaluk. These settlements now house just 131 people, as opposed to 205 in 2006.

It's not hard to see why some leave this place and its lifestyle. Life is, simply put, difficult. And it's not just the four months without sunlight and the winter temperatures that can plummet below minus-20 degrees.

Take water supplies: Villagers draw from a river pouring down from the ice cap during the summer and can store enough water in tanks to last four months. But when that is gone, they have to venture out onto the frozen fjord in winter to recover hunks from frozen-in icebergs using large construction equipment - a task that can be very dangerous.

The ice then has to be melted down, and the process means that Qaanaaq's water is "extremely expensive," said Kare Hendriksen, a professor of civil engineering at the Technical University of Denmark who has studied the village's infrastructure.

The cost of water, in turn, interferes with the fishing industry, which is making a bid to supplant hunting as a source of income - and also poses lower mercury risks, according to Dietz.

'A very, very big change'

Along Greenland's west coast, halibut fishing is one of the most profitable industries. Qaanaaq, too, has a fish factory. But the economics of getting the new industry off the ground have proven challenging, in significant part because of the cost of water.

"They clean the fish, but they don't process it. They don't cut it into filets. They just freeze it down as whole fish. And that's because of lack of water, the water price," Hendriksen said.

The halibut are caught through holes in the ice in the winter, including during the months-long blackness of polar night - and that's precisely the problem. The fishing takes place at the time when water is most expensive and hardest to obtain.

And then there's waste. As in many of Greenland's smaller settlements, there is no sewage system or flushing toilets here, according to Hendriksen - water infrastructure would have to be heated all throughout the winter, another major cost, or it would freeze. So waste is disposed of in bags that are taken to a dump and left for ships that arrive twice a year. But "a big part of the hazardous waste and iron scrap has been left on the dump for decades," Hendriksen wrote.

In addition to fishing, Qaanaaq also appears to want to seize on opportunities for tourism as the Arctic opens up to more ship traffic - although there are also fears about what that would do to the tightknit culture. There is a small hotel with a handful of rooms in town, as well as a restaurant, but very little else in the way of public bars or dining places.

"Some people get an income by showing tourists around," Dietz said. "But if you say you want to keep the old hunting traditions, and keep the old hunting society alive, then if you all of a sudden introduce tourism, then you make a very, very big change in how things used to take place."

Despite the difficulties of life here, it's hard to deny the piercing beauty of a place where every day - in summer, at least - there's a different array of enormous icebergs in the Inglefield Bredning. The scenery itself could be a draw.

When asked what he thinks people should know about Qaanaaq, Qujaukitsoq, the tourism director, said, "The beautiful area. Beautiful place."
chris.mooney@washpost.com

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In Greenland's northernmost village, a melting Arctic threatens the age-old hunt

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The northernmost village in Greenland sits just shy of 78 degrees north latitude - deep in the Arctic - yet during the summer, meltwater is everywhere. It flows in small rivulets and larger streams, past multicolored houses built against a sloping hill and down to the Inglefield Bredning, as it is called in Danish - a broad body of water at the confluence of several fjords.

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Fig Leaves Are Out. What to Wear to Be Kind to the Planet?

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Fig Leaves Are Out. What to Wear to Be Kind to the Planet?

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Polyester, one of the most common fibers, is a plastic derived from crude oil. The long fibers that make up polyester thread are woven together to make fabric. Extracting the oil and melting the plastic require energy.

Perhaps a bigger concern is what happens when synthetics get into the hands of consumers.

Synthetic fibers shed plastic filaments - possibly from daily wear and tear, but also in the wash. If shed in the laundry, the filaments can make it into sewer systems and eventually into waterways. Even if these microplastics are trapped at filtration plants, they can end up in sludge produced by the facilities, which is often sent to farms to be used as fertilizer. From there, the fibers can make their way into other water systems, or into the digestive tracts of animals that graze on the fertilized plants.

Researchers found plastic fibers in samples from 29 tributaries of the Great Lakes in a 2016 study, making up about 70 percent of all the plastic collected.

Scientists have not been able to fully quantify the scale of the problem, but early research showed that plastic fibers are among the most abundant environmental debris in the world, according to Mark Browne, a senior research associate at the University of New South Wales, Sydney.

Cotton is natural, but not all natural.

Cotton makes up about a quarter of all fibers used in clothing, furniture and other textiles. Synthetic fibers or rayon are often blended with cotton thread, especially if there is a cotton shortage, as there was in 2011, or if the price of cotton goes up.

Cotton's share of the textile market is declining, but cotton production still uses just over 2 percent of the world's arable land and accounts for about 3 percent of global water use, according to the United Nations.

Cotton also requires pesticides. According to the Department of Agriculture, 7 percent of all pesticides in the United States are used on cotton. Many of those chemicals seep into the ground or run off into surface water.

Consumers can choose organic cotton grown without pesticides, but it uses more water and requires more land than conventional crops. Organic cotton can also be much more expensive and difficult to find.

Rayon is made from plants - and also chemicals.

Rayon, one of the first man-made fibers, was developed from plant fibers as a substitute for silk in the 19th century. Most rayon today is produced as viscose rayon, which is treated with chemicals, including carbon disulfide.

Chronic exposure to carbon disulfide can cause serious health problems for rayon workers, including Parkinson's disease, premature heart attack and stroke, said Dr. Paul Blanc, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, who has written about the history of rayon. The chemicals may also be released into the environment, though the effects are harder to pinpoint. By the time the rayon gets to the store, it poses no danger to consumers, Dr. Blanc said.

Viscose rayon is often made from bamboo. In Indonesia and other areas, producers are cutting down old-growth forests to plant bamboo for rayon, said Frances Kozen, associate director of the Cornell Institute of Fashion and Fiber Innovation.

Ms. Kozen warned that viscose rayon is often wrongly marketed as environmentally friendly because it is derived from bamboo. The Federal Trade Commission has requir ed retailers to provide accurate labels.

If viscose rayon is produced mechanically from bamboo instead of chemically, which is sometimes known as "bamboo linen," it has a relatively small environmental impact, but it is much more expensive.

Another type of rayon fiber, known as lyocell or Tencel, is often made from bamboo but uses a different chemical that is thought to be less toxic, though studies are scarce, Dr. Blanc said.

Wool might be less practical, but it's probably more sustainable.

Producing wool requires sheep. And sheep, like other ruminants including cattle, produce methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, in their burps. One study suggested that 50 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions from the wool industry come from the sheep themselves.

Still, Ms. Kozen said she considered wool to be more ecologically sound than cotton, rayon or synthetic fibers, though she added that not everyone shares that view.

So what can you do?

"The best thing we can all do is buy less and wear more," Ms. Kozen said.

The " fast fashion " market isn't helping, since it encourages rapid turnaround between seasons and more frequent clothing purchases. These clothes aren't made to last, so they are more frequently thrown out.

When new clothes are made, materials are often shipped internationally from farms to factories to stores, adding to emissions.

Used clothing is also difficult to recycle; when synthetic fibers are woven together with natural ones, the natural fibers cannot biodegrade in landfills, which would take a long time anyway.

Even donating clothes can have unexpected consequences, said Andrew Brooks, a professor of development geography at King's College London. Since many donated clothes end up in less developed countries, "they also displace the opportunity to produce and manufacture things locally, creating a dependency between rich countries and poor countries," he said.

Some sustainable initiatives also save growers and producers money, said Nate Herman, a senior vice president for supply chain for the American Apparel and Footwear Association, an industry group. "That's the best driver for sustainability: what helps the bottom line."

For consumers, the most effective solution may be to keep wearing that old T-shirt that your family hates, buy used clothes or just make do with fewer articles of clothing.

The environmental problems from textiles will continue to compound, Ms. Kozen said, "if we can't get rid of that mind-set that clothing is disposable."

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Fig Leaves Are Out. What to Wear to Be Kind to the Planet?

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Polyester, one of the most common fibers, is a plastic derived from crude oil. The long fibers that make up polyester thread are woven together to make fabric. Extracting the oil and melting the plastic require energy. Perhaps a bigger concern is what happens when synthetics get into the hands of consumers.

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Supermoon-spiked king tide offers sneak preview of sea-level rise along East Coast - The Washington Post

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Supermoon-spiked king tide offers sneak preview of sea-level rise along East Coast - The Washington Post

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This week's supermoon was more than a spectacular sight in the night sky. It nudged up sea levels, leading to areas of coastal flooding along the East Coast.

Such inundation offered a glimpse of the new normal in certain low-lying areas as sea levels rise because of climate change.

Coastal sections of South Florida and New England were among those immersed in ocean water on Monday and Tuesday during high tide cycles. From Palm Beach to Miami, the Weather Service hoisted coastal flood advisories cautioning that tidal levels were running about a foot above normal "due to the occurrence of the super moon."

In New England, the Weather Service office in Boston said the combination of "very high astronomical tides" and a weak coastal storm would result in a water nearly a foot above normally dry land at high tide.

Other coastal areas along the East Coast were also experiencing coastal flooding, including Charleston, S.C.

Variable Boundaries - King Tide Flooding #Charleston https://t.co/Ds0jn5ToyM #chswx #sealevelrise #chs #photography @chswx @NWSCharlestonSC pic.twitter.com/Shu96pTQH7

- Jared Bramblett (@JTBramblett) November 15, 2016

Every year from November through February, the highest tides - called "king tides" - press onto the shores during full moons. This is a result of the enhanced gravitational pull from the full moon as well as Earth's being closest to the sun in its orbit (at perihelion). The tides get even higher during supermoons, because that's when the moon is closest to Earth (at perigee).

[The best photos of the biggest supermoon in 68 years]

Coastal flooding during such astronomically high tides has been increasing over time because of climate warming, which raises sea levels. "Recent sea level rise ensures that when king tides occur they increasingly cause localized flooding," the Union of Concerned Scientists said in a blog post.

Since 1960, sea levels have risen about 6 to 8 inches along the East Coast. Meanwhile, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has documented a 300 to 925 percent increase in "nuisance flooding."

Such flooding inundates areas that previously flooded only during big storms. It makes roads impassable, overwhelms storm drains and seeps into structures.

Such flooding is only expected to worsen and affect more land area in the coming decades as sea levels are projected to rise as much as several feet by the end of the century.
Photos and video South Florida

Did ya see this one? Pic from Miami Beach parking garage. Extra #HighTides carrying in more than sea water pic.twitter.com/CZUvtOBSys

- Kerrin Jeromin (@KerrinJeromin) November 15, 2016

#KingTides worse today on #pompanobeach A1A and Canal St. @WPLGLocal10 @BenKennedyTV on the scene. @mypompanobeach pic.twitter.com/AzCH9nqdSI

- Jeff Martin (@JeffMartinMedia) November 15, 2016

Cool time-lapse video of #kingtide flooding in #FortLauderdale this morning, via @PhotoSSentinel https://t.co/3niLDEUu8y pic.twitter.com/W2egYaO86M

- Brett Clarkson (@BrettClarkson_) November 15, 2016

If you dont "believe" in #SeaLevelRise, your head is in the sand. Until recently, water levels this high only assoc w/ hurricanes! #KingTide pic.twitter.com/ryyv0N7AGs

- Brian McNoldy (@BMcNoldy) November 14, 2016

New England

On Long Wharf-Boston #KingTide today @GreenovateBos @ImagineBos @BostonHarborNow @EF___ @henkovink @BosGreenRibbon pic.twitter.com/vr0NtLGmVd

- Carter Craft (@cartercraft) November 15, 2016

ALERT: Boston is dealing w/#KingTide right now with tides over 2 feet higher than normal leaving parts of Boston underwater... pic.twitter.com/QdBxvA1q4G

- Only In Boston (@OnlyInBOS) November 15, 2016

@ericfisher @SurfSkiWxMan @MattNoyesNECN Hampton Harbor #kingtide. pic.twitter.com/vp9KwOrKcw

- Joel Albair (@nepatsfan57) November 15, 2016

King Tide is Rolling into Boston pic.twitter.com/slEITTPx4G

- BostonTweet (@BostonTweet) November 15, 2016

#KingTide flooding at Long Wharf in #Boston. #wbz pic.twitter.com/NlLVhMHslt

- Eric Fisher (@ericfisher) November 15, 2016

King Tide flooding in Dorchester along the Harbor Walk. #wbz pic.twitter.com/vE5CpBTbAq

- Eric Fisher (@ericfisher) November 15, 2016

#kingtide at Browns. @EagleTribJill @MattNoyesNECN @mariastephanos pic.twitter.com/DeuhIczn3G

- Ed Johnson (@BigEd3006) November 15, 2016

#KingTide flooding by J's Oyster Bar in Portland, area blocked off #NEWCENTERnow pic.twitter.com/L3kTsQtQAH

- Jessica Gagne (@JessicaGagneTV) November 15, 2016

Check out this amazing #KingTide shot from Kennebunkport, Maine.
Thanks for sharing @KennebunkportME #NEWSCENTERnow pic.twitter.com/W9BQg0Gcwg

- Elle Ousfar (@ElleOusfar) November 15, 2016

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Supermoon-spiked king tide offers sneak preview of sea-level rise along East Coast

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This week's supermoon was more than a spectacular sight in the night sky. It nudged up sea levels, leading to areas of coastal flooding along the East Coast. Such inundation offered a glimpse of the new normal in certain low-lying areas as sea levels rise because of climate change.

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Scientists have long feared this ‘feedback’ to the climate system. Now they say it’s happening - The Washington Post

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Scientists have long feared this ‘feedback’ to the climate system. Now they say it’s happening - The Washington Post

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At a time when a huge pulse of uncertainty has been injected into the global project to stop the planet's warming, scientists have just raised the stakes even further.

In a massive new study published Wednesday in the influential journal Nature, no less than 50 authors from around the world document a so-called climate system "feedback" that, they say, could make global warming considerably worse over the coming decades.

That feedback involves the planet's soils, which are a massive repository of carbon due to the plants and roots that have grown and died in them, in many cases over vast time periods (plants pull in carbon from the air through photosynthesis and use it to fuel their growth). It has long been feared that as warming increases, the microorganisms living in these soils would respond by very naturally upping their rate of respiration, a process that in turn releases carbon dioxide or methane, leading greenhouse gases.

It's this concern that the new study validates. "Our analysis provides empirical support for the long-held concern that rising temperatures stimulate the loss of soil C to the atmosphere, driving a positive land C-climate feedback that could accelerate planetary warming over the twenty-first century," the paper reports.

This, in turn, may mean that even humans' best efforts to cut their emissions could fall short, simply because there's another source of emissions all around us. The very Earth itself.

"By taking this global perspective, we're able to see that there is a feedback, and it's actually going to be massive," said Thomas Crowther, a researcher with the Netherlands Institute of Ecology who led the research published Wednesday.

The new study is actually a compilation of 49 empirical studies, examining soil carbon emissions from research plots around the globe. The different studies produced variable results, including some cases in which soils actually pulled carbon from the air rather than releasing it. However, the researchers insist there was a pattern globally that was "predictable": Soil carbon losses generally tended to track how much warming a region had seen, and how thick the upper soil layer was.

The paper therefore found that the biggest losses were in Arctic regions, where soils are warming rapidly and also where they are quite thick - but also that well down through the mid-latitudes, soils were also losing carbon. And the net result for the research plots as a whole was a loss of soil carbon.

The paper then extrapolated these findings for the globe, finding that by the year 2050, the planet could see 55 billion tons of carbon (which converts to 200 billion tons of carbon dioxide, were it all to be released in this form) released from soils. That's if we continue on with a "business as usual" scenario of global greenhouse gas emissions and accompanying warming.

"It's of the same order of magnitude as having an extra U.S. on the planet," said Crowther. The world has less than 1,000 billion tons of carbon dioxide remaining to emit in order to preserve a reasonable chance of holding the planet's warming below 2 degrees Celsius, a widely embraced target, so soil emissions could help to bust the carbon budget.

Crowther argues that until now, the science community has often left this potential carbon feedback from planetary soils out of its calculations because it wasn't well enough understood. "The entire magnitude of this feedback was removed from several of the earth system models, the models that inform [the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], because of its massive uncertainty," he says.

Moreover, he adds that while the study did heavily consider the Arctic and thus, regions of permafrost soil (a huge repository of planetary carbon), it only took into account emissions from the upper layer of soil, about 10 centimeters thick. So if warming liberates carbon from deeper permafrost layers too - a major fear - then the numbers presented above for soil emissions could be too small.

There is, of course, one potential offset to this - even as the Earth's surface is losing carbon from soils, it also appears to be putting at least some back again due to an increased growth in vegetation, which is being fertilized by more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, in tern enhancing plant photosynthesis. However, Crowther does not believe this will suffice to offset soil carbon losses.

A recent study found that in the past decade or more, plant growth had indeed been sequestering more carbon dioxide - but as the lead author told the Post, "It's good news for now. We can't expect it to continue."

Another researcher who focuses on Arctic soils and reviewed the study for the Post, permafrost expert Ted Schuur of Northern Arizona University, agreed with Crowther on plant growth, suggesting that even if models predict it may offset soil loses, field studies like the ones summarized here don't support that.

"This impressive work again highlights the largest losses of soil C from high latitudes, which agrees with field measurement and incubations that we've summarized in our work," said Schuur. "These losses offset gains that are predicted in soil C in other temperature and subtropical ecosystems." Schur added that since the study only considers the first 10 centimeters of soil in the Arctic, "we might consider that a minimum loss since there is a lot of soil C beneath that."

Two other outside experts contacted by the Post took a similar tack.

"The authors correctly point out the lack of information from tropical ecosystems, in fact the southern hemisphere is not represented. Thus we need more data," said Charles Rice, a soil microbiology professor at Kansas State University who pointed out several limitations in the paper. But Rice nonetheless concluded that "the high latitudes are particularly vulnerable and a large source of CO2 back to the atmosphere. This highlights the need to do early action."

The study gives "strong support to the hypothesis that soils will release a substantial amount of carbon in response to rising air temperatures," added Jonathan Sanderman, a scientist with the Woods Hole Research Center who studies soil changes under climate change. "This is really critical, because if the additional release of carbon is not counterbalanced by new uptake of carbon by plants then it's going to exacerbate climate change and increases the urgency to immediately reduce greenhouse gas emissions."

But Sanderman also noted studies have suggested that better management of agricultural soils could sequester large amounts of carbon, perhaps enough to offset the losses projected in the new study.

"While this paper shows how soils are part of the problem, it's important to note that soils can also be part of the solution," Sanderman continued.
Read more at Energy & Environment: Pope Francis: 'Never been such a clear need for science' to protect the planet Over 2,000 scientists urge Trump to respect 'scientific integrity and independence' He created a beloved blog about the melting Arctic. But it got harder and harder to write For more, you can sign up for our weekly newsletter here and follow us on Twitter here.

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Scientists have long feared this 'feedback' to the climate system. Now they say it's happening

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At a time when a huge pulse of uncertainty has been injected into the global project to stop the planet's warming, scientists have just raised the stakes even further. In a massive new study published Wednesday in the influential journal Nature, no less than 50 authors from around the world document a so-called climate system "feedback" that, they say, could make global warming considerably worse over the coming decades.

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Falcons, Drones, Data: A Winery Battles Climate Change - The New York Times

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Falcons, Drones, Data: A Winery Battles Climate Change - The New York Times

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On a misty autumn morning in Sonoma County, Calif., Katie Jackson headed into the vineyards to assess the harvest. It was late in the season, and an army of field workers was rushing to pick the grapes before the first rains, however faint, began falling.

But on this day, Ms. Jackson, the vice president for sustainability and external affairs at Jackson Family Wines, was not just minding the usual haul of cabernet, chardonnay and merlot grapes. She also checked on the sophisticated network of systems she had put in place to help crops adapt to a changing climate.

Ms. Jackson, along with her siblings and mother, owns and operates Jackson Family Wines, one of the largest family-owned winemakers in the country. Best known for its Kendall-Jackson chardonnay, a supermarket staple, the family also produces dozens of other wines on five continents. After decades in the business, the Jacksons are sensitive to slight variations in the weather, and they are convinced of one thing: It is getting hotter and drier, and that could be a problem.

As California endures a yearslong drought, the Jacksons, like other winemakers, are grappling with new realities. Grapes, though a surprisingly resilient crop, are ripening earlier. Nights are warmer. Aquifers are running dry.

As a result, the region's wine country has become a laboratory for the reshaping of agriculture nationwide. Because, of course, it's not just California that's warming up.

The Jacksons are going beyond the usual drought-mitigation measures. They are using owls and falcons, to go after pests drawn by the milder winters. They are finding new ways to capture rainfall. And since fossil-fuel consumption is one of the biggest drivers of climate change, they are trying to become more energy efficient, in part through the use of old-school farming techniques.

Climate change is forcing the Jacksons to confront questions both practical and existential: Can you make fine wine with less water? Will good grapes still grow here in 20 years? What will become of an industry central to California's identity, one that says it contributes $114 billion a year to the nation's economy?

Wearing jeans, a plaid shirt and hiking boots, her hair pulled back in a loose ponytail, Ms. Jackson, 30, caught a ride with one of the vineyard managers to a hill overlooking the picturesque Alexander Valley, an area that produces some of California's best wines.

At the peak, she stopped to inspect a shed housing the recently-updated belly of the vineyard's irrigation system. Inside was a new energy-saving variable-frequency drive that allows for more precise, efficient watering.

Nearby was a solar-powered weather station. If the sensors decide it has become too cold in the middle of the night (climate change, of course, doesn't mean it's always hot), new wind machines will automatically start circulating warm air to protect the vines.

Beside that was an owl box - occupied - part of an effort to control pests without pesticides. And just below the peak was a man-made reservoir, one of more than 100 added to manage what is any farm's most precious resource: water.

"The climate has been getting warmer and warmer, and we're seeing more extremes, from really wet to really dry," Ms. Jackson said. "Little by little, we're learning."

So far the drought has not wreaked havoc on the California wine business. No harvests have been destroyed and quality remains strong. Moreover, many of the Jackson vineyards are in pockets of the California coast that benefit from the cool, humid fog.

But the challenges here are hardly theoretical. Already, climate change is threatening the world's coffee supply. Several reports suggest that rising temperatures around the globe could imperil major winemaking regions in the coming decades. One study suggested that by 2050, many regions in Europe, including much of Italy and swaths of Southern France, could become unsuitable for wine grapes. The same study suggested that California production could fall by 70 percent by the century's midpoint.

Already, winemakers in the region are noticing distinct changes that signal a hotter, drier future.

"It used to be there were a lot of nights when it would get 28 and 29 degrees, but now when farmers wake up, they're less likely to have a mud puddle with ice on it," said Daniel Sumner, a professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of California, Davis. "The growers are going have to be a little bit more nimble."

Climate change wasn't a pressing concern for Jess Jackson, a San Francisco lawyer, when he bought an 80-acre pear and walnut orchard in Northern California in 1974. Mr. Jackson wanted to try his hand at winemaking, and planted grapes on the land.

About a decade later, he released the first vintage of Kendall-Jackson. Aged in French oak barrels - a rarity for an American wine - Kendall-Jackson was an instant hit. Mr. Jackson was soon acquiring more vineyards throughout California.

Mr. Jackson, who died in 2011, raised his children around the business. Ms. Jackson worked her first harvest cleaning tanks and filters in a cellar. Today, she leads the company's sustainability efforts, pushing for the use of less water, lower fossil-fuel consumption and more natural farming techniques.

In 2008, the company formalized its sustainability program and began measuring its energy and water usage and its greenhouse gas emissions. "They are leaders," said Rex Stults, the government relations director of Napa Valley Vintners, a trade group. "But this is becoming an important topic for just about everybody."

The clearest sign of the Jackson family's efforts can be found in the network of more than 100 reservoirs scattered across its vineyards. Some have cost as much as $1.5 million to build.

On this morning, Ms. Jackson was visiting a reservoir on the sloping hills of the Stonestreet Estate Vineyards. The property is home to 800 acres of merlot, cabernet and chardonnay grapes, and another several thousand acres of uncultivated land.

Though it was late in the summer, the reservoir, which draws groundwater from a well, was still full. Two deer were drinking at its edge. The reservoir is connected to a gravity-fed drip irrigation system that pulls the water down the hills and through the vineyards. It now provides most of the water for the winery, which previously relied on wells and rain.

"We've seen a really sharp decrease in rainfall," Ms. Jackson said. "Having these in place meant we were able to have enough water to get us through the year. It's the biggest thing we've done to deal with the drought."

As California heats up, winemakers are confronting new challenges large and small - some very small.

Mice, voles and gophers love vineyards. "We're seeing more pest pressures due to warmer winters," Ms. Jackson said, walking through rows of cabernet grapes. Another emerging issue: Grapes ripen earlier, and swallows and crows are eating fruit before the harvest. "It's a big problem," she said.

That explains the owls. Sixty-eight boxes are occupied by hungry barn owls; during the harvest, a falconer comes to some vineyards every day, launching a bird of prey to scare away other birds with a taste for grapes.

The Jacksons have also begun analyzing their crops with increasingly sensitive tools. Ms. Jackson recently installed devices that measure how much sap is in the vines. They transmit the data over cellular networks to headquarters, where software calculates how much water specific areas of vineyards do or don't need. "Data-driven farming," Ms. Jackson said.

The Jacksons are also monitoring their crops using drones equipped with sensors that detect moisture by evaluating the colors of vegetation. The wrong color can indicate nutritional deficiencies in the crops, or irrigation leaks.

"Previously, it would require an experienced winemaker to go and look at the grapes," said Clint Fereday, the company's director of aviation. "Now we can run a drone, tag an area of the vines with GPS, and go right to the spot that has a problem."

The drones have other uses, too. An infrared camera can scan for people guarding illicit marijuana operations on nearby lands.

Not all the changes being made on the Jackson vineyards involve advanced technology. Some are simply ancient farming techniques that the drought has made increasingly relevant.

Field hands plant cover crops, like rye and barley, between every second row of vines, to help keep the soil healthy. The family is stepping up its composting program. Pressed grapes are composted, then placed beneath rows of vines, since the organic matter is better at retaining moisture than soil.

Ms. Jackson's husband, Shaun Kajiwara, is a vineyard manager for the company, overseeing the grapes that go into many of the upscale labels. Walking through rows of vines that will yield $100 bottles of wine, he said that in recent years the company had begun planting new vines that send roots deeper into the soil, drawing more ground water and requiring less irrigation.

The company also began sanitizing the 51,000-gallon tanks it uses to blend chardonnay with ultraviolet light instead of water. There is an elaborate new rainfall capture system. And workers have devised a system to recycle the water used to wash barrels. In total, these efforts are saving 28 million gallons each year in the company's California wineries.

"Each year we're finding more and more ways to make use of this water that was going down the drain," said Sam Jamison, the general manager of the label La Crema.

Now Ms. Jackson is overseeing an ambitious groundwater recharge project. This winter, the company plans to capture storm water runoff and flood a large, flat vineyard near the La Crema winery. If all goes as planned, the water will seep down and help replenish an aquifer from which the farm draws.

All these efforts have put the Jacksons in an enviable position: They have more water than they need.

In 2015, Ms. Jackson learned that the Green Valley Creek, an important tributary for the Russian River, was in trouble. Once a healthy stream, the drought had shriveled it to a series of stagnant pools, only occasionally connected by flowing water, adding to problems for the coho salmon, an endangered species. The Jacksons grow pinot noir grapes on a hill near the creek, and maintain a reservoir there; Ms. Jackson offered to release water in a bid to help the fish. Soon PVC piping was rigged up to the reservoir, winding down two miles of hillside to the creek.

Pushing away overgrown branches, Ms. Jackson made her way to the creek's edge, where she met up with David Hines, an in-stream flow specialist with the National Marine Fisheries Services. "It doesn't look like much, but this is an important tributary for coho," Mr. Hines said. In an eddy no larger than a kiddie pool were three baby coho, a few inches long and not more than seven months old.

"They're the young of the year," Mr. Hines said.

For Ms. Jackson, it was all of a piece with her efforts to ensure a healthy future for her family's business. And the family's efforts are making a difference. Since 2008, Jackson Family Wines has reduced its annual water usage by 31 percent.

"My family knows we aren't out of the drought yet," Ms. Jackson said. "There's still a lower snowpack. There's less groundwater in the Central Valley."

Water conservation can only accomplish so much. Jess Jackson had resisted expanding his winemaking operations to Oregon. The colder northern climate wasn't nearly as suitable for wine production, he thought, and California's perfect conditions weren't going anywhere anytime soon.

But since his death, his family has concluded otherwise. Oregon is producing some of the best pinot noirs around. In 2013, the company bought its first winery in Oregon. Last year, it expanded again, buying two properties with tasting rooms and more than 100 acres of planted vineyards outside Portland. Ms. Jackson says the northward expansion is part of the unending search for good wines. But it doesn't hurt that, in contrast to California's increasingly hot and dry climate, Oregon is comparatively cool and lush.

"Our sustainability efforts are always looking at water security issues," Ms. Jackson said. "The more abundant water in Oregon is nice to have."

One morning, Ms. Jackson and Mr. Kajiwara climbed aboard the company helicopter and headed north. Below them, fields of marijuana interrupted the rows of vineyards, and golden hills gave way to thick forests.

After a 30-minute ride, they touched down next to a new reservoir at the Jackson family's Pine Mountain property. Situated in Mendocino County, the land is higher in altitude, about 3,000 feet, and was acquired a few years ago for its cooler, wetter climate. The grapes grown here are used to make Captûre wines, which sell for up to $140 a bottle.

Ultimately, Mr. Kajiwara believes that with the right mix of new rootstocks, cover crops and fortuitous rainfall, some of the Jackson vineyards might not need irrigation at all. "In a few years, I think we could be dry-farmed up here," he said. "Our reservoir will just be insurance."

It is a snapshot of the future for the Jackson family: a vineyard north of traditional wine country, where natural features might offset some of the deleterious effects wrought by climate change. And, in combination with the adaptations Ms. Jackson has put in place, it might just be enough to allow the company to keep making fine wines for many years to come.

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THE POUR

Drought Brings Soul-Searching to California Winemaking

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Falcons, Drones, Data: A Winery Battles Climate Change

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On a misty autumn morning in Sonoma County, Calif., Katie Jackson headed into the vineyards to assess the harvest. It was late in the season, and an army of field workers was rushing to pick the grapes before the first rains, however faint, began falling.

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The Arctic Is Getting Crazy - Scientific American

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The Arctic Is Getting Crazy - Scientific American

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In the past year the climate in the Arctic has at times bordered on the absurd. Temperatures were 30 to 50 degrees Fahrenheit above average in some places during the recent Christmas week. Through November the area of ice-covered ocean in the region reached a record low in seven of 11 months-an unprecedented stretch. More important, perhaps, the difference between Arctic temperatures and those across the midlatitudes of North America, Europe and Asia during 2016 was the smallest ever seen.

That narrowing gap is important to note because it seems to be driving extreme weather in the midlatitudes, from heat waves and droughts to heavy snowfalls. Why is the Arctic so crazy lately, and how strong is the connection to bad weather to its south, where so many people live? Scientific American asked Jennifer Francis, who is a research professor at the Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University and has investigated Arctic climate change and its links to weather worldwide since 1994.

[ An edited transcript of the interview follows.]

How unusual is the ongoing string of Arctic climate records?
The records are astounding because there are so many of them. The extra warming that is happening up in the Arctic-the "Arctic amplification"-has been the greatest we've ever seen. We've also seen the lowest sea-ice thickness, and we've seen the greatest amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. That one doesn't usually make headlines but it should; that water vapor comes from more evaporation because there is more exposed, open ocean. Also, a lot more water vapor is being transported northward by big swings in the jet steam. That's important because water vapor is a greenhouse gas just like carbon dioxide and methane. It traps heat in the atmosphere. That vapor also condenses as droplets we know as clouds, which themselves trap more heat. The vapor is a big part of the amplification story-a big reason the Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else.

Does the extra vapor contribute to any sort of feedback loop-conditions that tend to feed upon themselves?
We're starting to think so. It is directly part of a feedback, in that more loss of sea ice causes more evaporation, which traps more heat, which melts more ice-one of the vicious cycles. But another vicious cycle that may be emerging is that when the Arctic is very warm, we think that is leading to the jet stream taking wavier paths-big northward swings and southward dips. When the jet stream does that, it transports more heat and moisture up into the Arctic, which heats the Arctic more, which make the jet stream even wavier-another vicious cycle related to disappearance of sea ice. During Christmas the North Pole was above freezing-which is crazy for that time of year-and it was related to one of the big swings in the jet stream.

Very recently scientists have begun to more directly link climate change patterns to extreme weather events, which they have typically been reluctant to do. Are the links becoming clearer?
Well, first, warmer temperatures worldwide are adding to heat waves. And more water vapor worldwide is related to the atmosphere being warmer-we have about 7 percent more water vapor in the atmosphere now than we did in the 1950s, which is directly linked to the increase in heavy precipitation events. Drought is also pretty directly related to a warmer atmosphere.

Arctic amplification-[the faster rise of Arctic temperatures than midlatitude temperatures]-may be the most controversial factor. What we think is happening is that amplification is favoring these very wavy patterns in the jet stream. When those waves get large, we tend to see very persistent weather patterns across midlatitudes. The waves tend to move very slowly, and the waves are what create weather we experience. Different parts of those waves tend to favor very stormy patterns, very dry patterns or warm versus cold. So in your neck of the woods, weather conditions are going to hang around longer.

It's still difficult to unravel the persistent drought in California-what fraction of that is due to general global warming versus more persistent jet stream patterns because the Arctic is warming fast. But that's where the research is happening right now.

So can we link the California drought to Arctic conditions or the jet stream?
This plays into how natural fluctuations in the climate system in the midlatitudes and the tropics are perhaps being intensified by Arctic warming. A good example-and some studies make this pretty clear-is when sea-surface temperature patterns in the Pacific Ocean tend to put one of these northward swings, or ridges, in the jet stream in particular locations. In the last few years the patterns have tended to put a ridge near the west coast of North America. That's a natural thing. Along with that, though, we've had very little sea ice on the Pacific side of the Arctic. There's been a lot of warm air over that region-Alaska has had a lot of record temperatures and a lot of rain. What we think happens is that when there is a ridge forming in a location where Arctic warming can intensify it, that makes the ridge strong and builds it even farther northward. It creates an even bigger wave in the jet stream. You get a stronger ridge over western North America and a stronger southward dip that is farther toward eastern North America.

How would that contribute to the California drought? Does it move the rain northward?
Ridges are dry, clear weather. This has been the so-called ridiculously resilient ridge-it has been in just the right place to make California really dry. It's sent the storms up into Seattle, the Pacific Northwest and Alaska.

Can we attribute other extreme weather to the Arctic, for example the excessive snowfall and cold in Siberia?
The 20- to 30-degree warmer anomalies in the Arctic have been matched by 20- to 30-degree colder anomalies in Siberia. This mechanism has been very well documented. The warm Arctic, particularly the region north of Scandinavia-the Barents and Kara seas-is one of the places where sea ice has been lost the most. It has been persistently low this year. That tends to bulge the jet stream northward, which creates a dip to the east that has helped usher more Arctic air down into Siberia, and also caused earlier snowfall there. Once you get snow on the land, it insulates the land and makes the weather even colder. Having snow earlier, and more of it, is one of these vicious cycles that makes it even colder-and the cold helps to induce the jet stream's southward dip there.

What about the polar vortex, which is said to be "meandering" more lately?
This gets weedier. Several trends in the last year and half suggest that when the jet stream gets wavy in the wintertime and the Arctic is really warm, we tend to see the stratospheric [or polar] vortex became less circular-more meandering, even split into two. This has happened a lot in the last few years. When the polar vortex gets disrupted, it tends to affect the jet stream late in the winter. There seems to be a long-term memory in the system, starting with low sea ice and warm temperatures in the fall in the Arctic, then this vortex behavior into February and even March.

Was there any connection to the heavy 2016 floods in Louisiana?
The flooding storm system was very slow-moving, but we've seen that before. Whether this is connected to the Arctic is tenuous.

Scientists have been reluctant to attribute specific weather events to climate change. Is that changing?
I think the reluctance initially was that this was a new hypothesis. And I think some of the people who have studied the tropics have pretty much maintained that the tropics controls weather patterns all over the world. So then comes a new kid on the block saying, "Oh, it's not just the tropics, it's the Arctic, too!" There was some reluctance to accept that this region on the top of the world could impact something as huge as the jet stream. But there have been many dozens of studies since 2012 that have supported the general idea. They're also finding that it is complicated-different mechanisms happen during different seasons in different places-but it's all starting to become clearer. There has been enough research now that the hypothesis is transitioning to a theory.

Is it fair to say the changing Arctic behaviors line up with what scientists expected?
Some events do not fit what was expected 10 years ago or even five years ago, but they do fit this newer hypothesis that links the Arctic with the jet stream. There is a clear indication that ENSO [the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or El Niño/La Niña cycle] is not the only game in town anymore.

And are the Arctic records happening sooner than expected?
It does seem as though things are unfolding faster than most people expected. The ice is certainty disappearing faster than we expected. Even five years ago most models were projecting that we'd see a summer without sea ice probably by end of the century. Now the estimates or more like 2030 or 2040, and even that might be too far into the future. The whole ream of records that has been broken in the Arctic in the past year seems to indicate that we're seeing things unfold faster. And that's happening all across the Earth's climate system.

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In the past year the climate in the Arctic has at times bordered on the absurd. Temperatures were 30 to 50 degrees Fahrenheit above average in some places during the recent Christmas week. Through November the area of ice-covered ocean in the region reached a record low in seven of 11 months-an unprecedented stretch.

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How Warming Seas are Forcing Fish to Migrate

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How Warming Seas are Forcing Fish to Migrate

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Scottish fishermen have uncovered an intriguing way to supplement their income: they have added squid to the menu of marine creatures they regularly pull from the sea. A species normally associated with the warmth of the Mediterranean, rather than the freezing north, may seem an odd addition to their usual catches of cod and haddock. Nevertheless, squid has become a nice little earner for fishing boats from Aberdeen and the Moray Firth in recent years.

Thirty years ago, squid was a rarity in the North Sea. Today, boats bring back thousands of tonnes a year - though cod and haddock still dominate catches. Nor is this warm-water addition to northern fish menus a unique feature. Red mullet, sardines and sea bass have also appeared with increasing frequency in North Sea fishermen's nets in recent years. All of them are associated with warmer waters and their appearance is seen by many scientists as a sign that climate change is beginning to have a serious impact on our planet's oceans.

For Scottish lovers of fresh squid, this is good news. However, in many other parts of the world, rising sea temperatures - triggered by climate change - are providing fishing industries and governments with major headaches. Fish are moving hundreds of miles from their old grounds, sometimes out of zones that had been set up to protect them. In other cases, fish are simply disappearing from nets.

Part of the problem has its roots in past overfishing. But now climate change is exacerbating the issue. Last week, scientists revealed that a vast chunk of ice was set to break away from the Antarctic Larsen C ice shelf, while Arctic sea ice extent is now at its lowest level for this time of year since records began.

And if sea temperatures continue to rise, even greater disruption will be caused to fishing stocks. Fishermen will lose their livelihoods and communities will be deprived of their only source of food.

"There is an unambiguous trend," said marine biologist Andrew Bakun of Miami University. "If you look at the world's fish catches as a whole, you find they are made up, more and more, of warm-water species as opposed to catches in previous years which had more species that were from cooler waters."

Seafood is the critical source of protein for more than 2.5 billion people today. However, over-exploitation in the past has resulted in a crash in fish stocks, with the result that the world's annual catch is now decreasing by more than 1 million tonnes every year - despite the availability of the latest fishing technology: nets big enough to engulf cathedrals, echo locators, satellite navigation, and powerful engines to drive boats.

Now climate change is making the management of this threatened supply even more difficult. "All the world's oceans are facing intense problems but the problem is going to be particularly serious for tropical countries, which are often underdeveloped and are far less able to maintain sustainable management regimes for their fisheries," said marine biologist Callum Roberts, of York University.

An example is provided by Bangladesh. Fish gives the nation 60% of its animal protein and is vital to the 16 million Bangladeshis living near the coast, a number that has doubled since the 1980s. However, a study - led by Jose Fernandes, of the Plymouth Marine Laboratory - of two key fish species, Hilsa shad ( Tenualosa ilisha) and Bombay duck ( Harpadon nehereus), showed that stocks of both could be devastated by climate change that would affect nutrient flows in coastal waters, ocean temperatures and sea levels.

The introduction of sustainable management measures would offset some of these impacts but stocks still face being cut significantly, the group added. "Both the sea and land environment are changing," said Fernandes. "The problem is that we know much less about the sea than the land, so it is harder to observe and to intervene."

Think of the problem as a double whammy, said marine ecologist Malin Pinsky, of Rutgers University, New Jersey. "Fish have already been reduced to low numbers by intense overfishing and that makes them far less able to deal with increasing temperatures or other effects of climate change."

Pinsky points to the example of the Atlantic cod in the Gulf of Maine. "It has been badly hit by intense overfishing. Now it appears that warmer waters have been reducing survival even further. The trouble is that the fisheries management in the area did not realise this and allowed fishing to continue there at a too high level."

Managing fish stocks in a warming world is proving to be a particularly thorny problem, he added. "Fish management maps have lines drawn on them but it turns out fish don't see those lines."

As waters warm, fish seek cooler waters and head to higher latitudes, a problem that has also been highlighted in the North Sea. There, closure areas have been set up to protect spawning and nursery grounds of plaice, herring and sandeel from intense fishing. "But if species shift their distribution in response to climate change it is possible such measures will become less effective in the future," says a study by a group of scientists led by John Pinnegar, of the government-funded Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (Cefas).

Another example of the problem was highlighted last week by the New York Times, which noted that the centre of the US black sea bass population is now found in waters off New Jersey. In the 1990s, it was hundreds of miles further south. Under fishing rules that were laid down then, North Carolina fishermen are still entitled to the largest share of black sea bass catches - which requires them to steam north for 10 hours to reach the black sea bass's current fishing grounds. By contrast, local New England fishermen are allowed to catch a small fraction of the black sea bass now found in their own neighbourhood and must throw all excess overboard.

The issue has already reached the status of causing international discord, as is revealed through the example of the humble mackerel. "Until recently, mackerel in the Atlantic were fished mainly by Britain, Ireland and Norway and stocks were protected by an EU quota system," said Roberts. "Then stocks began to head north, most probably because sea temperatures were rising. Eventually, mackerel reached Iceland - at which point Iceland asked to be included in fishing quotas. This request was rejected - so Iceland went ahead and started catching mackerel in any case."

The result was a drop in mackerel stocks and an international dispute that lasted several years and which has only recently been resolved - though this respite may only be temporary. "Unless we find ways to adapt quota agreements speedily and efficiently, we are going to see a lot more disputes like this one in future," Roberts said.

This point is highlighted in the study led by Pinnegar, which revealed that anchovy stocks are now spreading along the south coast of England. Talks are taking place to determine whether French or Spanish boats can fish for these - on the grounds that these stocks are extensions of existing populations from the south. Others argue that the new anchovy stocks are a separate population that is only now rebounding in numbers thanks to greatly improved climatic conditions, and that French and Spanish boats should be allowed only restricted access to them. The "anchovy wars" are looming, it would seem.

In addition to overfishing and warming sea temperatures, marine creatures face a further danger: ocean acidification. Increased amounts of carbon dioxide, pumped into the atmosphere from cars and factories, are being absorbed by the oceans, making their waters more acidic. The impact on coral reefs, which provide homes to thousands of different species of fish, is already being felt. Last year, it was reported that a rare underwater heatwave, combined with an increase in ocean acidity, had destroyed swaths of Australia's Great Barrier Reef.

This has led marine biologists to warn that all coral reefs risk being destroyed by the end of the century even if carbon dioxide emissions are kept to relatively low levels in future decades. Apart from the impact on one of the world's greatest natural wonders, the effect on fish stocks, and in particular shellfish, could be grim. Shells of marine creatures are made from calcium carbonate and their formation is disrupted by acidic water.

An example is provided by oyster farms on the Oregon coast. These farms regularly suffer from upwellings of acidic water from deep regions of the Pacific. When this happens, larval oysters die at the point when they have to form their first shells. "From the time eggs are fertilised, Pacific oyster larvae precipitate roughly 90% of their bodyweight as calcium carbonate shell within 48 hours," George Waldbusser at Oregon State University told the Climate News Network. "They must build their first shell quickly on a limited amount of energy - and, along with the shell, comes the organ to capture external food. It becomes a death race of sorts. Can the oyster build its shell quickly enough to allow its feeding mechanism to develop before it runs out of energy from the egg?"

Increasingly, the answer to this question appears to be no.

This point is summed up by Roberts. "Prawns, lobsters, clams and scallops - which now dominate our intensively fished seas - all lay down carbonate shells. The fishing industry is therefore badly exposed to risk from more acidic seas. Not only that, acidification threatens the important role that filter-feeding shellfish play in cleansing ocean water. Quite frankly, increased acidity is the last thing marine life needs given all of the other ways in which we are making oceans a tougher place to live."

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A lobster is processed at the Sea Hag Seafood plant in Maine, US. Photograph: Robert F Bukaty/AP

And then there is question of just how much seafood is actually eaten today. This turns out to be an issue of considerable controversy, one that was stoked last year in a study - by Daniel Pauly and Dirk Zeller of the University of British Columbia - that was published in the Nature Communications online journal. It indicates that the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has seriously underestimated the world's appetite for fish and miscalculated global annual catches. The FAO - using figures provided by individual governments - had suggested that annual catches began rising significantly over the 20th century, peaked at 96m tonnes in 1996 and have been declining slowly since then - largely due to the fact that fish stocks had been so seriously overfished.

Pauly and Zeller put the annual "peak fish" figure for 1996 at 130m tonnes while adding that levels have fallen off far more dramatically and worryingly as stocks have become depleted at a rate that is far sharper than realised previously. In other words, far more fish - millions of tonnes - is being taken from the seas than has been recorded by official statistics. This extra annual catch is made up by small-scale and subsistence fisheries and fish thrown back in the sea as discards, according to Pauly and Zeller.

What is particularly worrying about this discovery is the sharp rate of decline of fish catches in recent years. Despite sending out more boats, fitted with advanced fish detection technologies, fishermen are unable to catch as much as they used to.

Nor do Pauly and Ziller anticipate that it will stop. "I expect a continued decline because I don't expect countries to realise the need to rebuild stocks," Pauly told the Guardian. "I don't see African countries, for example, rebuilding their stocks, or being allowed to by the foreign fleets that are working there, because the pressure to continue to fish is very strong. We know how to fix this problem but whether we do it or not depends on conditions that are difficult."

It is against this grim background that the world's oceans are warming significantly, with temperature rises of several degrees being forecast by the end of the century. Inexorably, fish stocks will be pushed further towards high latitudes, confusing attempts to manage and to protect them, while the make-up of local fisheries will undergo drastic changes. The stress on one of the world's most important resources is going to be intense. The great fish migration has begun.

On 15 January 2017, the Observer published the following clarification: In "The Great Ocean Migration: How warming seas are forcing fish to seek new waters" (Special Report, last week, page 13), we said the world's annual catch is now decreasing by more than 1 million tonnes every year. This was based on a study produced last year at the University of British Columbia, which was quoted in the article claiming that the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation had seriously miscalculated global annual catches. We should clarify that the FAO bases its figures on annual landings of fish, not catches. It says global landings have stabilised since 1996; indeed, excluding the fluctuating Peruvian anchovy, from 2008 to 2014, the last year of available data, landings have increased year on year, not decreased. And, contrary to the study, the FAO does not confine itself to government figures when compiling its data. Calculations from regional fisheries and territorial authorities are also included and validations carried out to improve official figures.
Topics

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How warming seas are forcing fish to seek new waters

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Scottish fishermen have uncovered an intriguing way to supplement their income: they have added squid to the menu of marine creatures they regularly pull from the sea. A species normally associated with the warmth of the Mediterranean, rather than the freezing north, may seem an odd addition to their usual catches of cod and haddock.

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‘A Conservative Climate Solution’: Republican Group Calls for Carbon Tax - The New York Times

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‘A Conservative Climate Solution’: Republican Group Calls for Carbon Tax - The New York Times

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A carbon tax, which depends on rising prices of fossil fuels to reduce consumption, is supported in general by many Democrats, including Al Gore. Major oil companies, including Exxon Mobil, have come out in favor of the concept as well.

The Baker proposal would substitute the carbon tax for the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan, a complex set of rules to regulate emissions which President Trump has pledged to repeal and which is tied up in court challenges, as well as other climate regulations. At an initial price of $40 per ton of carbon dioxide produced, the tax would raise an estimated $200 billion to $300 billion a year, with the rate scheduled to rise over time.

The tax would be collected where the fossil fuels enter the economy, such as the mine, well or port; the money raised would be returned to consumers in what the group calls a "carbon dividend" amounting to an estimated $2,000 a year for the average family of four.

The plan would also incorporate what are known as "border adjustments" to increase the costs for products from other countries that do not have a similar system in place, an idea intended to address the problem of other "free-rider" nations gaining a price advantage over carbon-taxed domestic goods. The proposal would also insulate fossil fuel companies against possible lawsuits over the damage their products have caused to the environment.

Attacks on the plan can be expected from many quarters, even among supporters of a carbon tax in theory. Supporters of the Clean Power Plan are likely to oppose its repeal. Democrats also tend to oppose limitations on the right to sue like those envisioned in the Baker proposal. And the idea of a dividend will no doubt anger those in the environmental movement who would prefer to see the money raised by the tax used to promote renewable energy and other new technologies to reduce emissions.

It is also unclear how the plan will be received by the Trump administration. Stephen K. Bannon, the senior counselor to the president, has shown little interest in appeasing establishment Republicans. Breitbart News, which Mr. Bannon led before joining the Trump White House staff, has been outspoken in denying the science of climate change.

Whatever the fate of the plan, it is a notable moment because it puts influential members of the Republican establishment on the record as favoring action on climate change - a position that is publicly held by few Republicans at the national level, though many quietly say they would like to throw off the orthodoxy in the party that opposes action.

"This represents the first time Republicans put forth a concrete, market-based climate solution," said Ted Halstead, an author of the paper and social entrepreneur whose organization, the Climate Leadership Council, is posting the memo outlining the plan. Mr. Halstead, who also founded the New America research institute, said the political left and right had stalled on climate action in part because they disagreed about the means to fixing the problem, even though they might find common ground.

Some popular environmentalists take stands that those on the right can never embrace, Mr. Halstead said, citing the works of Naomi Klein, who attacks capitalism itself as the root of climate change. "That is so at odds with the conservative worldview, of course they're going to walk away," he said. "The only way for this solution to come about is if it gets a start on the right."

The other co-authors of the memo include N. Gregory Mankiw and Martin Feldstein, former chairmen of the Council of Economic Advisers, and Rob Walton, the former chairman of Wal-Mart.

A survey taken just after the 2016 election by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that 66 percent of registered voters supported a carbon tax on fossil fuel companies, with the money used to reduce personal taxes. The party breakdown for that support was 81 percent of Democrats, 60 percent of independents and 49 percent of Republicans. Even among Trump voters, 48 percent support taxing fossil fuel companies, according to the Yale program.

Mr. Baker said it was time for the Republican Party to engage in the discussion of global warming beyond simple denial.

"It's really important that we Republicans have a seat at the table when people start talking about climate change," Mr. Baker said. He said that, like many Republicans, he was skeptical that human activity was the main cause of warming, but that the stakes were too high for inaction. "I don't accept the idea that it's all man made," he said, "but I do accept that the risks are sufficiently great that we need to have an insurance policy."

As for the likelihood of success of his plan, "I have no idea what the prospects are."

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'A Conservative Climate Solution': Republican Group Calls for Carbon Tax

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A carbon tax, which depends on rising prices of fossil fuels to reduce consumption, is supported in general by many Democrats, including Al Gore. Major oil companies, including Exxon Mobil, have come out in favor of the concept as well.

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A Crack in an Antarctic Ice Shelf Grew 17 Miles in the Last Two Months - The New York Times

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A Crack in an Antarctic Ice Shelf Grew 17 Miles in the Last Two Months - The New York Times

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The crack in Larsen C now reaches over 100 miles in length, and some parts of it are as wide as two miles. The tip of the rift is currently only about 20 miles from reaching the other end of the ice shelf.

Once the crack reaches all the way across the ice shelf, the break will create one of the largest icebergs ever recorded, according to Project Midas, a research team that has been monitoring the rift since 2014. Because of the amount of stress the crack is placing on the remaining 20 miles of the shelf, the team expects the break soon.

"The iceberg is likely to break free within the next few months," said Adrian J. Luckman of Swansea University in Wales, who is a lead researcher for Project Midas. "The rift tip has moved from one region of likely softer ice to another, which explains its step-wise progress."

The time-lapse image below shows the rift gradually widening from late 2014 to January of this year.

Ice shelves, which form through runoff from glaciers, float in water and provide structural support to the glaciers that rest on land. When an ice shelf collapses, the glaciers behind it can accelerate toward the ocean. Higher temperatures in the region are also helping to further the ice shelf's retreat.

If the ice shelf breaks at the crack, Larsen C will be at its smallest size ever recorded.

That would also leave the ice front much closer to the ice shelf's compressive arch, a line that scientists say is critical for structural support. If the front retreats past that line, scientists say, the northernmost part of the shelf could collapse within months. It could also significantly change the landscape of the Antarctic peninsula.

"At that point in time, the glaciers will react," said Eric J. Rignot, a glaciologist, professor at University of California Irvine and a senior scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "If the ice shelf breaks apart, it will remove a buttressing force on the glaciers that flow into it. The glaciers will feel less resistance to flow, effectively removing a cork in front of them."

The crack reaches all the way to the bottom of the ice shelf.

The crack in Larsen C is a third of a mile deep, down to the floor of the ice shelf.

Scientists fear that two crucial anchor points will be lost as the shelf retreats.

According to Dr. Rignot, the stability of the whole ice shelf is threatened.

"You have these two anchors on the side of Larsen C that play a critical role in holding the ice shelf where it is," he said. "If the shelf is getting thinner, it will be more breakable and it will lose contact with the ice rises."

Ice rises are islands that are overriden by the ice shelf, allowing them to shoulder more support of the shelf. Scientists have yet to determine the extent of thinning around the Bawden and Gipps ice rises, though Dr. Rignot noted that the Bawden ice rise was a much more vulnerable anchor.

"We're not even sure how it's hanging on there," he said. "But if you take away Bawden, the whole shelf will feel it."

The collapse of the Larsen C ice shelf may not sharply affect global sea level rise, but the collapse of other vulnerable ice shelves will.

The Larsen A and B ice shelves disintegrated in 1995 and 2002, though both were drastically smaller than Larsen C. Neither contributed significantly to global sea level rise, however, because they were already floating above water, and the glaciers behind them did not contain a substantial volume of ice.

According to Dr. Rignot, the collapse of Larsen C would add only a tiny amount of water to the global sea level. Of greater concern to scientists is how the collapse of ice shelves can affect the glaciers that flow behind them, because the melting of those glaciers can cause much higher levels of ocean rise. Scientists see the impending Larsen C collapse as a warning that much larger amounts of ice in West Antarctica could be vulnerable.

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national aeronautics and space administration

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A Crack in an Antarctic Ice Shelf Grew 17 Miles in the Last Two Months

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The crack in Larsen C now reaches over 100 miles in length, and some parts of it are as wide as two miles. The tip of the rift is currently only about 20 miles from reaching the other end of the ice shelf.

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Climate Change News That Stuck With Us in 2016 - The New York Times

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Climate Change News That Stuck With Us in 2016 - The New York Times

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As the year ends, The New York Times asked reporters who have focused on climate change, global warming and the environment to choose the news they reported on that was the most memorable. These are their selections, ranging from sea level rise to the phenomenon of "rolling coal" to local actions to confront a warming planet.

Two other groups of reporters have also selected the articles they find most memorable: Visit this link for a roundup of science news, and this link for the year in medical and health news.

From One Hottest Year Into the Next

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The year in climate news began with a theme that is growing familiar: word that 2015 had been the warmest year on record, just beating out 2014.

The immediate cause in both cases was a powerful climate pattern, known as El Niño, in which the tropical Pacific Ocean poured an enormous amount of heat into the global atmosphere, disrupting weather patterns on every continent. But scientists said the back-to- back heat records would not have occurred without an underlying trend of global warming caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases.

That physical reality does not seem to be making much of an impression in the United StatesCongress, where a large number of lawmakers continue to claim that the warming trend is somehow not real, or is even the product of a global scientific hoax. But in the real world, the effects are starting to be felt as never before. As land ice melts the world over and heat absorption causes ocean water to expand, the sea level is rising. Coastal communities from Norfolk, Va., to Miami are being forced to reckon with the consequences.

A small detail: Tidal flooding is becoming so common that towns are posting "No Wake" signs on the streets, where vehicles driving a little too fast through a foot or two of seawater can send damaging waves crashing against nearby property.

The extreme burst of global temperature records waned late in the year as the cooler La Niña weather pattern replaced El Niño in the tropical Pacific. But even so, the World Meteorological Organization predicted in November that 2016 would most likely beat 2015 to become the record-warmest year, the first time such a global temperature record will have been set three years in a row. - Justin Gillis

Countering Denial by Being Nice

How do you talk about climate change during a presidential administration that denies it's happening?

President-elect Donald J. Trump has called climate change a hoax, and he has declared he will try to reverse the Obama administration's environmental efforts on matters ranging from the 2015 Paris climate agreement to the landmark Clean Power Plan, intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

But while administrations change, one thing appears to be stable: Most Americans already know that climate change is real and that human activity since the Industrial Age is the major cause. Polls by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that more than half of those surveyed said that global warming is real, and only one in five disagree. But these same surveys show that Americans tend to rank the issue rather low in their priorities of urgent need for action.

The question for those trying to fight climate change, then, is how best to build on the degree of agreement that already exists and to encourage action by governments, businesses and individuals. For a very long time, these issues have been hashed out in fiery arguments between those who deny the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate science and those who try to explain the science and the reasons for strong measures. I dealt with that important question in an article about Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University who uses a gentle approach to reach the large number of Americans who are in the potentially persuadable middle. There is room for every kind of discourse, from raucous to gentle, when it comes to telling Americans about warming. But I came away from that piece with a thought that initially seemed banal, but ended up feeling profound: niceness works. - John Schwartz

Local Responses to a Changing Global Climate

Most people who think that climate change is really happening also acknowledge that humans have caused it. But getting people to actually do something about it may be the next phase in the battle to prevent catastrophic warming.

Over the course of the last year, I've spoken with people in different communities around the world who are trying to do what they can to make a difference, even if they can't see the effects.

In a small village in the English countryside, residents have been working for 10 years to make their community carbon neutral - they've insulated their homes, hung laundry out to dry and installed solar panels. Part of their success has been in their approach: This should be fun, and it should involve all of us, because all of us stand to benefit from staving off the worst effects of climate change.

They have tried to connect the global problem of climate change to normal life, because it's not always about the melting polar ice caps or apocalyptic drought. Yes, climate change is about those things, but it is also about the ways that life in the 21st century makes most people, especially those in the developed world, part of the problem.

How are your own habits connected to larger environmental problems? How much power are you still using even when you've switched off your devices? How many plastic bottles of water do you drink every week, and how does that affect the environment and other people around you?

In the wake of the Paris agreement, most countries are involved in the fight against climate change. And while governments and power companies may make the most difference, what the rest of us - all seven billion of us - are doing matters, too. - Tatiana Schlossberg

Engines of Environmental Backlash

If there is one phenomenon that epitomizes the contempt for regulations - particularly those designed to protect the environment - among some Americans, it might be " rolling coal."

It's a fad among some diesel truck owners who soup up their engines and remove their emissions controls to belch black smoke at pedestrians, cyclists and even unsuspecting Prius drivers.

And depending on whom you ask, the fad is a juvenile prank, a health hazard, a stand against rampant environmentalism or a brazen show of American freedom. I've seen rolling coal called the "open carry" of the anti-environmentalism movement.

"Why don't you go live in Sweden and get the heck out of our country. I will continue to roll coal anytime I feel like and fog your stupid eco-cars," one angry Illinois voter wrote to a local state representative who has proposed a $5,000 fine on anyone who removes or alters emissions equipment.

At its core, rolling coal seems to me to be a symptom of a backlash against the notion that we should seek to minimize the human footprint on earth, for the sake of the environment.

It is not the only such act. Since 2007, activists have drawn attention to the environment with a call to switch off appliances worldwide during an annual Earth Hour. But since 2009, the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute - home base of Myron Ebell, who Trump tapped for the transition at the Environmental Protection Agency - has countered with Human Achievement Hour, a call to spend that same hour keeping things on in defense of humankind's "basic human right to use energy."

Still, rolling coal goes too far even for some at the institute. Coal rollers who use their trucks for harassment, as opposed to celebration, "aren't being rebellious," said Michelle Minton, who is a fellow there. "They are just being jerks." - Hiroko Tabuchi

A Costly Effort to Make Coal Cleaner

In the deeply poor, rural county of Kemper, Mississippi, there is a project to build a first-of-its-kind power plant using technology that has been heralded as the answer to many of our climate change woes.

A poster child for the promise of so-called clean coal, the troubled plant has occupied a central role in the Obama administration's plans to counter climate change. The technology the plant is supposed to showcase is also at the center of President-elect Trump's vision for many of our energy and environmental challenges.

Producing roughly 45 percent of the emissions that cause climate change, coal is a dirty fuel source. Yet the world still relies on it for power. The Kemper project was supposed to provide a model for a new version of carbon-capture technology that could be replicated around the world.

But the Kemper power plant is more than two years past deadline and more than $4 billion over budget. The plant's owner faces credit downgrades, multiple lawsuits and an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The investigation of this project unveiled an almost Shakespearean tale. In one arc we followed the prevailing public perception of the project as it shifted from hope to skepticism. In another arc we saw an engineer's personal journey from project pitchman to plant whistle-blower. Along the way, we watched a steady upward creep in the project's cost, shifting explanations the company and regulators gave for delays, and a growing intensity in the warnings from workers on site.

It all added up to more questions than answers: Did the plant's owner intentionally mislead the public, investors and regulators about the cost and timetable of the project? Why have 23 of the poorest counties in the country been saddled with costs connected to the most expensive power plant in American history? Can clean coal be replicated and built affordably and quickly enough to make it worth the investment? These questions remain. - Ian Urbina

California's Drought Is Not Over

Parts of California were relatively wet last winter, leading to a much larger snowpack in the Sierra Nevada than the year before, along with rising optimism that the state might eventually see an end to severe drought conditions that have lingered for four years.

But when I visited Yosemite National Park in April for an article about the snowpack, high spring temperatures were already melting it quickly. And there were other worrisome signs of the effects of climate change - more rain and less snow at higher elevations.

Since then, California has seen some improvement. Only 21 percent of the state is in "exceptional" drought, down from 45 percent a year ago, as reported by the U.S. Drought Monitor, and there are even areas in the northwestern part of the state that are drought free.

But California is still in the grip of a prolonged drought, and the outlook - for the state and more broadly for the Southwest - is not promising. Forecasters say that in the short term, drier conditions may return this winter because of the weather phenomenon called La Niña. But it is the long-term situation that should be sobering for anyone who lives, or is thinking of living, in the region. Scientists say climate change has increased the risk of megadroughts, long dry periods that could make the current drought seem mild by comparison. - Henry Fountain

Climate Change and NASA's Mission on Earth

It is not easy to find out what's happening in the Arctic Ocean. If you have a few months to spare, you can board an icebreaker and chug across a small section of the sea, taking measurements. Alternatively, you can pore through the images of the North Pole that have been captured by satellites over the past few decades.

Those images tell a startling story. While month-to-month measurements can be jumpy, the overall trend has been clearly heading down. Last month, satellites measured the lowest extent of Arctic sea ice for November since satellites started keeping records in 1979.

Global warming is a driving force behind this change. As we pump more carbon into the atmosphere, scientists warn that the Arctic will lose even more ice. In a matter of decades, scientists estimated this year, the Arctic Ocean may become ice-free in the summer.

The disappearance of Arctic ice is already having a huge impact on the ocean's ecosystem. In November, a team of scientists published a new analysis of satellite data, finding that the ocean has been increasing its production of algae by some 47 percent since 1997. Scientists suspect that the size and timing of this bloom is altering the entire Arctic food web, and they're now gathering data to find out what exactly is happening.

This study was carried out as part of NASA's Earth Science program, using data largely supplied by NASA's satellites. Shortly after the it was published, reports came out that President-elect Trump's advisers are pushing to shut down NASA's study of our own planet.

If we let our Earth-monitoring satellites wink out, the planet will not stop changing. The only thing that will change is our own ability to understand the Earth. - Carl Zimmer
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Climate Change News That Stuck With Us in 2016

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As the year ends, The New York Times asked reporters who have focused on climate change, global warming and the environment to choose the news they reported on that was the most memorable. These are their selections, ranging from sea level rise to the phenomenon of "rolling coal" to local actions to confront a warming planet.

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The Great Barrier Reef’s catastrophic coral bleaching, in one map - Vox

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The Great Barrier Reef’s catastrophic coral bleaching, in one map - Vox

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It's official. The Great Barrier Reef cannot be saved.

The prognosis comes from the Australian government's Reef 2050 advisory committee, made up of experts and scientists responsible for managing the reef's future.

In the more optimistic times of 2015, the committee put out a report on how to best preserve the reef. But now two of the committee's experts have told the Guardian that the plan is no longer feasible "due to the dramatic impacts of climate change."

Instead, they recommend that the goal be revised to "maintain the ecological function" of the Great Barrier Reef. And the reef may now have a better shot of being listed as a " World Heritage site in danger," a designation the Australian government has fought for for years.

Record temperatures have killed almost half of the coral in the Great Barrier Reef

One reason for the bleaker forecast for the reef is the record ocean temperatures for the second year in a row that produced mass bleaching along the reef, leaving almost half of the coral dead.

The latest aerial surveys released by scientists in April show a recent bleaching event almost as severe as the record bleaching of 2016 that left two-thirds of the reef damaged. Bleaching occurs when extreme heat forces algae to abandon coral, turning them pale white.

In 2016, El Niño was responsible for a spike in ocean temperatures, which led to an unprecedented level of bleaching along the northern third of the reef. Scientists found as many as 95 percent of the corals surveyed in 2016 were severely bleached.

Bleaching is not necessarily fatal for coral, but 2016 was also the highest level of coral mortality ever recorded on the Great Barrier Reef. In the worst-affected area, a 435-mile region in the north near Cooktown, Australia, as much as 67 percent of shallow-water corals died.

This year, scientists says climate change and rising ocean temperatures are behind the bleaching of the reef, with bleaching spread further south, hitting the middle third particularly hard. Only the southern third of the reef is unharmed.

Scientists say it's too soon to calculate this year's coral death toll, but it's already clear the damage extends further south than last year.

Bleached coral reefs can recover, but rising ocean temperatures are making this increasingly difficult

Scientists have now documented four major bleaching episodes along the Great Barrier Reef - 1998, 2002, 2016, and now 2017 - which means that most of the reef has undergone some form of severe bleaching in the past 18 years. (If you want to read more about why recent bleaching events are putting the reef in serious jeopardy, you should check out Brad Plumer's excellent explainer).

Corals can bounce back from bleaching. But recovery is a slow and uneven process, particularly for coral that are centuries old.

"It takes at least a decade for a full recovery of even the fastest-growing corals, so mass bleaching events 12 months apart offers zero prospect of recovery for reefs that were damaged in 2016," said James Kerry, one of the researchers at James Cook University's Australian Research Council Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, in a statement on the most recent findings.

Complicating coral recovery now is the fact that the bouts of bleaching are growing longer and more severe, while the much-needed recovery periods are shorter and less frequent.

The culprit? Record-high ocean temperatures that don't appear to be dropping anytime soon. As you can see in the map below, this February marked yet another unseasonably hot month. NOAA's Coral Reef Watch recorded abnormal heat stress at nearly every point along Australia's eastern coast from February 21 to 27, 2017.

Mark Eakin, coordinator of Coral Reef Watch, told NASA that this is alarming because the current bleaching along the Great Barrier Reef is ongoing.

"Unlike past global bleaching events (in 1998 and 2010) that lasted less than 12 months, this event is in its 33rd month and shows no sign of stopping," he said. "It has been the longest, most widespread, and most damaging coral bleaching event ever recorded."

What's more, some experts believe efforts to combat coral bleaching have been in vain. Jon Brodie, a researcher at James Cook University and water quality expert, told the Guardian that projects to improve Australia's water quality, which were at the heart of the government's response, were failing.

"Last year was bad enough, this year is a disaster year," Brodie told the Guardian. "The federal government is doing nothing really, and the current programs, the water quality management is having very limited success. It's unsuccessful."

The real answer to stop coral bleaching lies in reducing our CO2 emissions, which are causing ocean waters to warm. But emissions are not on track to stay below the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold, and coral reefs could perish if the planet continues to warm.

As Terry Hughes, head of the Australian Research Council Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, said in a statement, the "window to do so is rapidly closing." Otherwise, we are looking at unabated bleaching of the reef.

Here's a short video researchers compiled of aerial shots that capture the extent of bleaching along the Great Barrier Reef in 2017:

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Experts: The Great Barrier Reef cannot be saved

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It's official. The Great Barrier Reef cannot be saved. The prognosis comes from the Australian government's Reef 2050 advisory committee, made up of experts and scientists responsible for managing the reef's future. In the more optimistic times of 2015, the committee put out a report on how to best preserve the reef.

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Short Answers to Hard Q's: Climate Change

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Short Answers to Hard Q's: Climate Change

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The Science of Climate Change Explained: Facts, Evidence and Proof

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Definitive answers to the big questions.

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How Americans Think About Climate Change

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How Americans Think About Climate Change

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Americans want to restrict carbon emissions from coal power plants. The White House and Congress may do the opposite.

In every congressional district, a majority of adults supports limiting carbon dioxide emissions from existing coal-fired power plants. But many Republicans in Congress (and some Democrats) agree with President Trump, who this week may move to kill an Obama administration plan that would have scaled back the nation's greenhouse gas emissions.

Nationally, about seven in 10 Americans support regulating carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants - and 75 percent support regulating CO2 as a pollutant more generally. But lawmakers are unlikely to change direction soon.

Bob Inglis, a former Republican congressman from South Carolina, warned that committed activists - like the Tea Party - can shape politicians' approaches to issues like climate change. "Those are the ones who can take you out at the next primary," he said. Mr. Inglis lost his primary in 2010 to Trey Gowdy, a Tea Party candidate who attacked his climate views.

Most people think that climate change will harm Americans, but they don't think it will happen to them.

Most people know climate change is happening, and a majority agrees it is harming people in the United States. But most don't believe it will harm them.

Part of this is the problem of risk perception.

Global warming is precisely the kind of threat humans are awful at dealing with: a problem with enormous consequences over the long term, but little that is sharply visible on a personal level in the short term. Humans are hard-wired for quick fight-or-flight reactions in the face of an imminent threat, but not highly motivated to act against slow-moving and somewhat abstract problems, even if the challenges that they pose are ultimately dire.

Texas and Florida are vulnerable to climate change, but residents are split on how much to worry about it.

The effects of climate change, including sunny-day flooding, are being felt across Florida. But the state shows a distinct north-south split in the level of concern over global warming, and it is not a simple Democrat-versus-Republican distinction, said State Representative Kristin D. Jacobs, a Democrat. Four southeast Florida counties - Miami-Dade, Broward, and Monroe and Palm Beach - stand out because of their concerted effort to work on climate issues together and to discuss it in nonpartisan terms.

South and West Texas, as well as the state's Gulf Coast, are more worried about climate change than the rest of the state - and politics alone cannot explain it. South Texas favors Democrats, West Texas is decidedly more mixed, and the Gulf Coast in November 2016 was solid Trump territory.

One thing is shared by those disparate parts of the state: They have felt the brunt of shifting weather patterns, including rising temperatures, coastal hurricanes and western droughts so long and severe that some West Texas towns now recycle wastewater for drinking.

The state's highest concentrations of Latinos can be found in the south and west, which may also partly explain the difference in climate views. Roberto Suro, a professor of public policy and journalism at the University of Southern California, suggested age as a possible factor. Latinos are " a young population with the median age significantly younger than the white population, and younger still than the African-American population," he said, noting that young people have embraced climate science to a greater extent than their elders.

Everybody talks about the weather. But the climate? Only in some places.

Thirty three percent of Americans surveyed said they discuss global warming at least occasionally with friends and family - and 31 percent said they never do. But there are distinct regional patterns.

In the West, much of which has been affected by drought and wildfires, residents are more likely to talk about climate change. New England states, and not just the liberals of Massachusetts and Vermont, talk more about the climate, as well, along with coastal South Carolina, which lies in a path many hurricanes have taken.

But aside from Southeast Florida, which has put so much effort into making discussion of climate change a priority, much of the rest of the Atlantic Coast is less likely to engage in climate discussions, despite recent increases in tidal flooding.

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How Americans Think About Climate Change, in Six Maps

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Americans want to restrict carbon emissions from coal power plants. The White House and Congress may do the opposite. In every congressional district, a majority of adults supports limiting carbon dioxide emissions from existing coal-fired power plants.

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Climate Change, Accelerating Plant Growth

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Climate Change, Accelerating Plant Growth

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For decades, scientists have been trying to figure out what all the carbon dioxide we have been putting into the atmosphere has been doing to plants. It turns out that the best place to find an answer is where no plants can survive: the icy wastes of Antarctica.

As ice forms in Antarctica, it traps air bubbles. For thousands of years, they have preserved samples of the atmosphere. The levels of one chemical in that mix reveal the global growth of plants at any point in that history.

"It's the whole Earth - it's every plant," said J. Elliott Campbell of the University of California, Merced.

Analyzing the ice, Dr. Campbell and his colleagues have discovered that in the last century, plants have been growing at a rate far faster than at any other time in the last 54,000 years. Writing in the journal Nature, they report that plants are converting 31 percent more carbon dioxide into organic matter than they were before the Industrial Revolution.

The increase is because of the carbon dioxide that humans are putting into the atmosphere, which fertilizes the plants, Dr. Campbell said. The carbon in the extra plant growth amounts to a staggering 28 billion tons each year. For a sense of scale, that is three times the carbon stored in all the crops harvested across the planet every year.

"It's tempting to think of photosynthesis at the scale of the entire planet as too large to be influenced by human actions," said Christopher B. Field, the director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, who was not involved in the study. "But the story here is clear. This study is a real tour de force."

Starting in the Industrial Revolution, humans began to pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at a prodigious rate. Since 1850, the concentration of the gas has increased over 40 percent.

Since plants depend on carbon dioxide to grow, scientists have long wondered if that extra gas might fertilize them. The question has been hard to answer with much certainty.

For one thing, a plant relies on more than just carbon dioxide. It also needs water, nitrogen and other compounds. Even with a perfect balance of nutrients, plants may grow at different rates depending on the temperature.

To get some real-world measurements of plant growth, some scientists have built enclosures so that they can determine the precise amounts of carbon dioxide as well as the growth of plants. They can even run experiments by flooding the enclosures with extra carbon dioxide.

Trees and other plants in these enclosures have indeed grown faster with more carbon dioxide. But it has been hard to extend these results to the planet as a whole. Scientists found that plants responded differently to carbon dioxide in different parts of the world. The logistical challenge of these experiments has mostly limited them to Europe and the United States, leaving huge swaths of forests in the tropics and the far north little studied.

More recently, scientists have turned to satellites to get clues to what plants have been doing. They have measured how green the land is, and from that data they have estimated the area covered by leaves.

But this method has its shortcomings, too. Satellites cannot see leaves hiding under clouds, for example. And the size of leaves serves as only a rough guide to a plant's growth. If a plant builds bigger roots, that growth will be hidden underground.

In the mid-2000s, atmospheric scientists discovered a powerful new way to measure plant growth: by studying an unimaginably rare molecule called carbonyl sulfide.

Carbonyl sulfide - a molecule made of a carbon atom, a sulfur atom and an oxygen atom - is present only in a few hundred parts per trillion in the atmosphere. That is about a million times lower than the concentration of carbon dioxide. Decaying organic matter in the ocean produces carbonyl sulfide, a gas that then floats into the atmosphere.

Plants draw in carbonyl sulfide along with carbon dioxide. As soon as it enters their tissues, they destroy it. As a result, the level of carbonyl sulfide in the air drops as plants grow.

"You can see it in real time," said Max Berkelhammer, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "In the morning when the sun rises, they start to pull it out."

This discovery led scientists to go to Antarctica. The air that reaches the South Pole is so well mixed that its carbonyl sulfide level reflects the worldwide growth of plants.

As ice forms in Antarctica, it captures bubbles of air, creating a historical record of the atmosphere reaching back thousands of years. Last year, Dr. Campbell and his colleagues analyzed carbonyl sulfide records from the last 54,000 years.

Over the course of several thousand years at the end of the ice age, the gas dropped significantly. Dr. Campbell said the decline reflected the retreat of the glaciers. As new land was uncovered, plants sprang up and began destroying carbonyl sulfide.

It is more challenging to interpret the more recent record in the ice. Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have added extra carbonyl sulfide through textile manufacturing and other activities. This infusion of carbonyl sulfide has raised levels of the gas in the ice over the past century.

But Dr. Campbell and his colleagues found that it hasn't increased very much. As we have been adding carbonyl sulfide to the atmosphere, plants have been pulling it out. In fact, the scientists found, they have been pulling it out at a staggering rate.

"The pace of change in photosynthesis is unprecedented in the 54,000-year record," Dr. Campbell said. While photosynthesis increased at the end of the ice age, he said, the current rate is 136 times as fast.

With all that extra carbon dioxide going into plants, there has been less in the air to contribute to global warming. The planet has warmed nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880, but it might be even hotter if not for the greening of the Earth.

Dr. Berkelhammer, who was not involved in the new study, said the research would serve as a benchmark for climate projections. "It means we can build more accurate models," he said.

To test out climate models, researchers often go back to the historical record and see how well they can replay it. Now they can see if their models project plants growing at the rate observed by Dr. Campbell and his colleagues.

It is still an open question what plants will do in years to come if carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise.

More carbon dioxide might spur even more growth. But many climate models project that plants will suffer as temperatures rise and rainfall patterns shift. Despite the extra carbon dioxide, worldwide plant growth may fall, and plants will no longer help to buffer the impact of global warming.

"I've been referring to this as a carbon bubble," Dr. Campbell said. "You see ecosystems storing more carbon for the next 50 years, but at some point you hit a breaking point."

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Antarctic Ice Reveals Earth's Accelerating Plant Growth

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For decades, scientists have been trying to figure out what all the carbon dioxide we have been putting into the atmosphere has been doing to plants. It turns out that the best place to find an answer is where no plants can survive: the icy wastes of Antarctica.

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"People come to Asheville to retire," says Deke Arndt, "and data comes to Asheville to retire, too."

He should know. Arndt and his colleagues sit atop a vast trove of current and historical climate data-data so valuable, it's protected by multiple failsafes and even backed up on tape at an undisclosed, secure location, where it's carried by hand in a nondescript suitcase several times a week.

The data in question isn't bank account information, or Social Security Numbers, or nuclear codes. It's even more important than that: their data encompasses everything we know about our changing climate.

Arndt is chief of the monitoring section of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Centers for Environmental Information, and he stewards data collected at weather stations, from satellites, by buoys, and covering every weather and climate condition you can imagine. How hot is the ocean? How big was that tsunami? What's the weather like in space? The NCEI can (and does) answer every single one of those questions.

All told, they host a mind-boggling 28.6 petabytes- data equivalent to 18 Eiffel Towers' worth of stacked-up smart phones. Arndt and his colleagues spend their days poring over data, comparing the incoming numbers to the baseline they call "normal." Using daily, weekly, monthly, and annual rhythms, they coordinate data collection and sharing, keeping an eye on the quality of the numbers and how they stack up compared to yesterday, last week, and longer.

For Arndt, climate is all about scale-and the information that passes through his office tells a story that's become all too familiar. "The upper atmosphere is cooling while the lower atmosphere is warming," he says. "You don't get that without changing the composition of the atmosphere. We're seeing changes you would theoretically see in a warming world. More big rain-that's an expectation. More big heat-that's an expectation. The frozen stuff is generally melting or going away, based on the time of year and the location on the planet."

He pauses for a moment, then continues. "I think the basics are more than settled."

But what are the basics? How can we know if the climate is really changing? And does it really present the kinds of threats that have now become a familiar, but jarring, refrain?

Simply put, climate change is a change in the climate. If this is "no duh" territory, hang in for a second-it's a bit more complicated than that. To really get climate change, it helps to understand a couple of other factors that often get lost in the shuffle.

The events that happen on a day-to-day basis in the atmosphere-from rain to snow to wind and heat-are known as weather. The average of weather over time is climate. So while weather isn't climate, climate is weather, just looked at over a longer period of time.

Then there's climate variability: the ways in which climate changes over periods of time like seasons. If a weather phenomenon like temperature or humidity goes above or below the long-term average for a certain time period of seasons or years, it's known as climate variability.

For example, some years experience a higher-than-average sea surface temperature. When the average numbers go over a certain threshold, it's an El Niño event. When they go below a certain threshold, it's a La Niña. But both phenomena are an example of climate variability, because they're cyclical. They come and go naturally. However, as Earth's atmosphere and oceans continue to warm, El Niños could get more severe-or even stop being cyclical altogether- because of climate change.

When the average climate changes in a consistent upward or downward direction over the longer term, that's what we call climate change. That change shifts the average weather of a place (or the entire planet) into a new normal.

Some people use the term "global warming" when they mean "climate change," but they're not exactly the same thing. Global warming is just a single part of a bigger change in climate-the warming of the average temperature near the surface of the earth.

All told, climate change encompasses much more. And predictions of just where climate change is headed sound dire indeed. More acidic oceans. Rising sea levels. Less ice, permafrost, and snowpack. Potentially catastrophic weather events. Extinction. Disease. But how can we know if those changes are really taking place?

"It's really, really clear-cut. It's like you're adding drops of a poison to a glass of water. You can see it happening. You know it's going to be toxic if-I don't know why I'm coming up with so many morbid examples."

Aradhna Tripati interrupts herself and starts to laugh. She's sitting with her advisee, Ph.D. student Bryce Mitsunaga, in her office at the University of California, Los Angeles and trying to figure out a way to express just how clearly she and her colleagues agree that climate change is well under way.

Tripati, an associate professor at UCLA's Department of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences, and Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, has spent her career putting climate data into context. Her lab uses chemistry to reconstruct the climate norms of the distant past-norms that make today's atmosphere look a lot more alarming.

It might seem that it's impossible to reconstruct what the atmosphere was like tens of millions of years ago. But information about that long-gone time is actually locked inside the chemical structure of really old things like mollusk shells. Tripati helped develop a " paleothermometer "-a technique that helps scientists measure past temperatures by analyzing the chemical ratios the ancient atmosphere left behind in those specimens. She can also suss out similar information from bubbles trapped in ancient ice cores.

Tripati has learned a lot about the long-past atmosphere using this technique. In 2009, she discovered that the last time carbon dioxide levels were as high as they are now was a full 15 million years ago-a time when the sea was 120 feet higher and the global average temperature up to 10°F warmer than it is now. This year, she collaborated on work that suggests that during that time-when CO2 levels were about the same level as they are now-the Antarctic ice sheet was particularly vulnerable to temperature fluctuations. And another project she co-authored showed that a dramatic ice sheet collapse 14,000 years ago caused the entire Earth's jet stream to shift within a mere century.

"If you want to figure out which model is right and why it's right, you have to use observations of the past," she says. "It's like Shakespeare's 'The Tempest': Past is prologue." Those past observations offer a context in which to view today's climate-one in which Earth's atmosphere is filled with the largest concentration of carbon dioxide in human history.

Greenhouse gases-the gases that trap heat within the atmosphere-are changing Earth's climate today, just as they did then. But there's a difference between today's warming and that of the past. Much of today's warming is due to human activities, and many human interventions not only spew greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, but also threaten the natural sinks, like forests and plankton, that are meant to absorb those gases.

It's like a car in a grocery store parking lot, says Tripati. Park it on a sunny day with the windows and doors closed, and you've got a recipe for heat. The more greenhouse gases you have in the atmosphere-the thicker your windshield is-the more radiation from the sun is trapped inside.

Without a sink (an open window or door), the heat can't escape. With the help of reflective surfaces like ice (the equivalent of a sun screen on your dashboard), the car could cool down a bit. But as the ice melts, it becomes a matter of life or death.

"You'd never stick your beloved pet or your friends or family in that situation, right?" asks Tripati.

"How far can we take this metaphor?" asks Mitsunaga.

Tripati laughs again, then tries another. "It's like adding hot sauce," she says. "The more hot sauce you add to your burrito, the spicier it gets. That's what happens when you add more CO2 to the atmosphere."

Earth's atmosphere isn't the only thing heating up and deviating from long-established norms. Today's ocean is approximately 30 percent more acidic than it was before industrialization-thanks to the rising amount of carbon dioxide it must absorb. Sea levels are on the rise; Arctic sea ice is thicker and less extensive, ice sheets on both sides of the planet are melting, and glaciers are retreating or disappearing all around the world.

And those changes are happening fast. It used to be that scientists measured climate change in terms of hundreds or millions of years, but not anymore. In 2013, climate scientists at Stanford University conducted a review of dozens of scientific studies and climate models and determined that in the coming century, climate change is likely to happen 10 times more quickly than the global changes of the past 65 million years.

A slew of recent research, including a suite of four papers that appeared in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last year, suggests just how dramatically human activity has already affected a key climate change indicator: Earth's sea levels. Two of the papers came to almost the exact same conclusions about the amount the sea level has risen in the last century. Another suggested that the melting Antarctic ice sheet could disappear much more rapidly than scientists once thought. That could spur a chain reaction as sea levels rise, coastal areas and wetlands flood, soil is flooded, and animal habitats are lost.

These kinds of chain reactions are among the things scientists most fear. Life on Earth is closely related, and an anomaly on one side of the globe can cause another anomaly elsewhere. And soon, many of those anomalies will become the norm.

So is Earth past the point of no return? Maybe. Last year, carbon dioxide concentrations passed a critical threshold of 400 parts per million. Scientists now predict that we'll never go below that threshold again during our lifetimes. And even if we stopped emitting carbon today, it could take thousands of years for the CO2 to be neutralized.

That's not to say that cutting emissions won't help; the lighter the load, the closer recovery will be, and reduced CO2 levels will make it easier to mitigate other, shorter-lived greenhouse gases like methane.

Arndt, perched atop of his mass of data and with more coming in every day, doesn't ask himself whether climate change is happening. Instead, he wonders what comes next for science-and Earth. "These large-scale changes are very consistent with a warming planet," he says. "Now, how do we understand and quantify how much more or less likely they are in a warming world? It's a tough science."

Tripati agrees. "In some places, we really don't have a good handle on how much precipitation is going to change and how much evaporation is going to change. We know it's going to get hotter. We know that evaporation rates are going to go up. But we don't know how much things are going to change. There are sleeping dragons. And now I realize how many there are." For Arndt, Tripati, and the thousands of scientists dedicated to tracking climate and figuring out its modern-day trajectory, it's not a matter of if-or even when. The only question left is "how?"
You can find point-by-point explanations of the types of evidence described above here.

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How we know that climate change is happening-and that humans are causing it

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"People come to Asheville to retire," says Deke Arndt, "and data comes to Asheville to retire, too." He should know. Arndt and his colleagues sit atop a vast trove of current and historical climate data-data so valuable, it's protected by multiple failsafes and even backed up on tape at an undisclosed, secure location, where it's carried by hand in a nondescript suitcase several times a week.

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Trump's Climate Agenda, Big Changes Ahead

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Trump's Climate Agenda, Big Changes Ahead

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This is it. The battle over the future of US climate policy is officially underway.

In a sweeping new executive order, President Trump ordered his Cabinet today to start demolishing a wide array of Obama-era policies on global warming - including emissions rules for power plants, limits on methane leaks, a moratorium on federal coal leasing, and the use of the social cost of carbon to guide government actions.

Everyone knew this was coming: Trump has said repeatedly that he wants to repeal US climate regulations and unshackle the fossil fuel industry. But Tuesday's order is only a first step. Trump's administration will now spend years trying to rewrite rules and fend off legal challenges from environmentalists. And it's not clear they'll always prevail: Some of President Obama's climate policies may prove harder to uproot than thought.

Trump's order, meanwhile, doesn't say anything about whether he wants the US to stay in or withdraw from the Paris climate deal, the key international treaty on global warming. Although Trump vowed to pull out of the accord during the campaign, some of his advisers, like Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, have reportedly warned that he'd face immense diplomatic backlash if he did so. A White House official said that's "still under discussion."

The order also doesn't challenge the Environmental Protection Agency's fundamental authority to regulate greenhouse gases via the so-called "endangerment finding," a power that Obama used to craft climate policy after early attempts to pass legislation failed.That's important: If the EPA's regulatory authority survives the Trump era, then a future president could use it to write new rules to curb US emissions. That's what happens when climate policy is crafted through the executive branch, as it currently is in the United States - things can change drastically with a new president.

The key components of Trump's new climate and energy order

There's a lot in Trump's order, so let's break down its key features. Trump is telling the EPA and other relevant federal agencies to:

1) Start rolling back the Clean Power Plan. The Clean Power Plan was Obama's signature climate policy, a major EPA rule aiming to cut emissions from existing US power plants 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. This rule is currently on hold while the DC Circuit Court looks it over, and Trump's Department of Justice will ask the court to suspend the case until the EPA can review and write a new version of the rule. (It's unclear if the court will do so; it may still issue an opinion that will influence what can actually be done to rescind or rewrite the plan.)

As I explained at length here, Trump's new EPA head, Scott Pruitt, will now begin the laborious process of trying to write a new rule - either by insisting that the EPA doesn't need to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants (a legally risky approach) or by replacing Obama's rule with a more modest version that only requires incremental cuts at coal plants. No matter what approach Pruitt takes, he'll have to go through the formal rulemaking process, justify the change in court, and survive legal challenges from environmental groups. This could take years to resolve.

2) Reconsider carbon standards for new coal plants. In addition to regulating existing power plants, Obama's EPA also set CO2 standards for anyone who wants to build a new power plant. The Obama-era standards basically make it impossible to build a new coal-burning facility in the United States unless it can capture its carbon emissions and sequester them underground, a costly and still-nascent technology known as CCS.

By law, Pruitt likely needs to set some sort of standards for new plants, but he could try to rewrite Obama's rule so that new coal plants merely have to use ultra-supercritical technology, which is less effective at reducing emissions than CCS but is also somewhat cheaper. (Under the Clean Air Act, standards for new plants have to be based on the "best available control technology," and Pruitt could argue that CCS is not yet widely available.) No matter what approach the EPA takes, however, it's unlikely utilities will be building many new coal plants soon - especially since natural gas is so cheap.

3) Reconsider regulations on methane emissions from oil and gas operations. Carbon dioxide isn't the only major greenhouse gas - there's also methane, a key ingredient in natural gas that can seep into the atmosphere during oil and gas extraction. Obama set a goal of reducing these emissions 40 percent below 2012 levels by 2025, and both the EPA and the Bureau of Land Management set various rules forcing drillers to detect and plug their leaks. The Trump administration may now try to rewrite these rules, though, again, they'll have to justify any changes through the courts.

4) Revisit the "social cost of carbon" estimate used to justify climate regulations. Back in 2007, a federal judge ordered the Department of Transportation to take climate change into account when weighing the costs and benefits of new regulations.

So in 2009, Obama's White House gathered a dozen agencies together and tried to assign a dollar value to the cost of emitting a ton of carbon dioxide - taking into account scientific modeling on the damage caused by aspects of global warming, such as droughts and floods. They settled on a central estimate of around $36 per ton in 2015, rising over time. This "social cost of carbon" (SCC) can help justify regulations that reduce emissions - such as the Department of Energy's efficiency standards for appliances - since there's a clear way to quantify the benefits.

The Trump administration will now explore ways to redo and possibly lower the SCC estimate, which will make it harder for stringent climate rules to pass cost-benefit analysis - though, again, they may face court challenges. One route they may take: Take into account only the damages that climate change causes the United States, instead of the damage globally. That would produce a smaller SCC. Note, however, that the National Academy of Sciences disagrees with this approach, and many experts think the SCC should be higher, not lower.

5) Lift the moratorium on federal coal leasing. The federal government owns more than 570 million acres of land with coal reserves buried below, which it leases out to mining companies. Environmentalists and other critics have argued that the feds hand out these leases much too cheaply, which amounted to a backdoor taxpayer subsidy to fossil fuels. In 2016, Obama's Department of Interior put a moratorium on new federal coal leases until they could review and revamp the program.

In his executive order, Trump will tell the Interior Department to lift the moratorium, a fairly straightforward step that can be done with the stroke of a pen. In the short term, this won't have a huge practical impact, because there's currently a coal supply glut and mining companies aren't really pursuing new federal leases right now. The big question is how Trump handles the results of that review, and whether he alters the leasing program to try to get a better deal for taxpayers in the future.

6) Repeal guidance for factoring climate change into NEPA reviews. Under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), federal agencies are supposed to do formal environmental reviews of all major actions they take, like coal leasing or permitting new pipelines. And in many cases, the courts have ordered these agencies to take climate impacts into account. (The agencies don't necessarily have to do anything to mitigate these impacts, but they do have to account for them and post them publicly.)

Under Obama, the Council on Environmental Quality issued some guidance to the agencies on how to follow these legal guidelines when incorporating climate into their NEPA reviews. Trump is now rescinding this guidance, which can be done with a simple signature.

It's unclear how much practical impact this will have. Agencies will still be required to follow the law and consider greenhouse gas impacts when conducting environmental reviews of projects like coal leasing, says Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. If they don't, they can still get sued in court. If anything, the lack of guidance from Trump's White House may well cause more confusion around proper procedures to follow - leading to more litigation, not less. What this does signal, though, is that the federal government is going to be a little less diligent about thinking through climate impacts going forward.

7) Rescind a bunch of Obama's other executive orders on climate. The Obama White House issued a number of other executive orders and documents related to climate change, such as: the Climate Action Plan (basically laying out the administration's goals on global warming); an order urging federal agencies to reduce their CO2 output; and an order urging federal agencies to help communities strengthen their resilience to climate impacts. Trump can and will undo all of these with a stroke of a pen.

8) Tell agencies to review all rules inhibiting energy production. Finally, under the auspices of promoting "energy independence," Trump will instruct all federal agencies to review all of their rules, policies, and guidances and see if there's anything that inhibits the development of domestic energy production - from coal to oil and gas to nuclear power and renewables. In the next 180 days, the agencies will send their findings to the White House, which will decide how to proceed from there.

Trump is chipping away at Obama's climate policies - but it's hard to repeal everything

This executive order is part of a much broader assault on Obama-era climate policies. Earlier this month, Trump announced the EPA would review (and possibly weaken) the Obama's fuel economy standards for cars and light trucks in the post-2022 period. And the White House is crafting a budget proposal that requests sharp cuts to a variety of climate programs at the EPA, Department of Energy, NASA, NOAA, and elsewhere.

Overturning everything Obama has done on climate will be difficult, however. Some rules, like the fuel economy standards, can only be weakened - not killed entirely. Other regulatory rollbacks may get thwarted by federal judges. And Congress will have final say over the EPA's budget, with even some Republicans now balking at the steep cuts Trump has been mulling to clean energy programs.

So it's too soon to say how successful Trump will be in killing all of Obama's policies - or what the ultimate impact on emissions and global warming will be. But a new research note from the Rhodium Group tries to model what would happen if Trump manages to eviscerate all the climate policies mentioned in Tuesday's executive order.

If that happened, the group found, the US is very unlikely to meet its Paris treaty pledge of cutting greenhouse gas emissions 26 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. Instead, emissions would stall out at around 14 percent below 2005 levels - a shallower drop than would've been expected if Obama's policies had stayed in place:

What's notable about this chart is that that Trump's executive order can't halt allclimate progress. Emissions would still decline gently in the coming years, thanks to market forces and policies that Trump can't really touch.

For example: Many US utilities are increasingly moving away from coal and toward cleaner (and often cheaper) sources such as gas, wind, and solar - that shift will almost certainly continue no matter what the White House does, since it's being driven by more than EPA rules. (Trump isn't going to roll back federal tax credits for wind and solar or the fracking boom that's driving natural gas prices down.) Meanwhile, states like New York and California will keep pursuing their own more stringent climate policies.

What Trump can do, however, is bog down any momentum that may have been building toward deep decarbonization. After all, if we want to halt climate change, it's not enough for US emissions to continue to drop slowly or flatline. They have to drop dramatically. That would've been a huge challenge even if Hillary Clinton had been elected president - she was mainly planning to expand some of Obama's EPA programs at the margins. But it now looks extremely unlikely under Trump.

Further reading:

- Note that the Trump administration is promising that the order will bring back all the coal jobs lost since 2009. But that's unlikely - as I explained in detail here. At best, Trump might slow the decline of US coal production by repealing the Clean Power Plan. But automation and the glut of cheap gas from fracking will continue to cause mining jobs to dwindle.

- I asked legal experts how Trump could kill Obama's Clean Power Plan. Here's what they said.

- This interview with Harvard's Jody Freeman delves into all the obstacles Trump and Pruitt may face in trying to repeal EPA regulations.

- If you want to see what a major push to stop global warming would actually look like, check out this eye-opening decarbonization "road map" that was recently published in Science.

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Trump's big new executive order to tear up Obama's climate policies, explained

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This is it. The battle over the future of US climate policy is officially underway. In a sweeping new executive order, President Trump ordered his Cabinet today to start demolishing a wide array of Obama-era policies on global warming - including emissions rules for power plants, limits on methane leaks, a moratorium on federal coal leasing, and the use of the social cost of carbon to guide government actions.