Climate

Earth’s plants aren’t holding onto carbon as long as we thought.

A new analysis of pulses of radioactive carbon-14 from 20th-century bomb tests reveals that plants stock more carbon in short-lived tissues such as leaves than previously estimated, scientists report in the June 21 Science. That means that this carbon is probably more vulnerable to re-release to the atmosphere — potentially altering estimates of how much anthropogenic carbon the biosphere can hold, the team says. More

Hurricane Beryl, the Atlantic Ocean’s first hurricane in 2024, began roaring across the Caribbean in late June, wreaking devastation on Grenada and other Windward Islands as it grew in power. It’s now swirling on like a buzzsaw toward Jamaica and Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula.

Beryl is a record-breaking storm, commanding attention in a year already filled with record-breaking climate events (SN: 6/21/24; SN: 4/30/24).

On June 30, the storm became the earliest Atlantic hurricane on record to achieve Category 4 status. Just a day later, it had intensified further, becoming the earliest Atlantic storm on record to achieve Category 5 status, with sustained winds of about 270 kilometers per hour, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami. (As of late July 2, the storm has weakened slightly but remains a powerful Category 4 ahead of making landfall in Jamaica.) More

On a banana plantation in rural Australia, a second-generation farming family spreads crushed volcanic rock between rows of ripening fruit. Eight thousand kilometers away, two young men in central India dust the same type of rock powder onto their dry-season rice paddy, while across the ocean, a farmer in Kenya sprinkles the powder by hand onto his potato plants. Far to the north in foggy Scotland, a plot of potatoes gets the same treatment, as do cattle pastures on sunny slopes in southern Brazil.

And from Michigan to Mississippi, farmers are scattering volcanic rock dust on their wheat, soy and corn fields with ag spreaders typically reserved for dispersing crushed limestone to adjust soil acidity. More

Warming UpMadeleine OrrBloomsbury Sigma, $28

It’s easy to think of sports as an escape from reality, removed from the glaring problems of our world. Researcher Madeleine Orr shatters that illusion in Warming Up: How Climate Change Is Changing Sport. In her debut book, Orr shepherds readers through an at-times overwhelming deluge of all the ways climate change is disrupting sports around the world, providing a compelling case for action from athletes, sports leagues and fans alike. More

June is the new July. Or maybe even August. At least it feels that way, as summer heat has already soared to record highs.

In the United States, West Coast residents sweltered earlier in the month as a high-pressure weather system called a heat dome trapped record-breaking high temperatures over the region (SN: 7/19/23). Now, another heat dome is bringing another wave of extreme heat to swaths of the Midwest and East Coast, with temperatures forecasted to reach close to 38° Celsius (100° Fahrenheit) in many cities. More

In the Arctic, a mysterious atmospheric phenomenon generates some of the oddest clouds on Earth.

Up there, streaky wisps can swiftly transform into towering thunderstorms. These strange clouds are not just visually mesmerizing. Nor are they just drivers of powerful storms. They may also play a role in the Arctic’s breakneck pace of warming, researchers say, a pace about four times as fast as that of the rest of the planet (SN: 8/11/22).

But climate simulations of the region can’t accurately incorporate the birth and evolution of these clouds: There’s simply too little known about the forces that shape them. More

Climate change is warming the Arctic tundra about four times faster than the rest of the planet. Now, a study suggests that rising temperatures will spur underground microbes there to produce more carbon dioxide — potentially creating a feedback loop that worsens climate change.The tundra is “a sleepy biome,” says Sybryn Maes, an environmental scientist at Umeå University in Sweden. This ecosystem is populated by small shrubs, grasses and lichen growing in cold soils rich with stored organic carbon. Scientists have long suspected that warming will wake this sleeping giant, prompting soil microbes to release more of the greenhouse gas CO2 (SN: 8/11/22). But it’s been difficult to demonstrate in field studies.

Maes’ team included about 70 scientists performing measurements in 28 tundra regions across the planet’s Arctic and alpine zones. During the summer growing season, the researchers placed clear, open-topped plastic chambers, each about a meter in diameter, over patches of tundra. These chambers let in light and precipitation but blocked the wind, warming the air inside by an average of 1.4 degrees Celsius. The researchers monitored how much CO2 microbes in the soil released into the air, a process called respiration, and compared that data with measurements from nearby exposed patches. More

A torrent of giant hailstones in northeast Spain may have been fueled by climate change.

On August 31, 2022, a brutal hailstorm struck the small Spanish city of La Bisbal d’Empordà. The storm unleashed balls of ice up to 12 centimeters wide, causing widespread damage to property and crops, injuring dozens of people and killing a 20-month-old toddler. Computer simulations now suggest that in a preindustrial climate, the storm could not have generated hailstones this big, researchers report in the March 28 Geophysical Research Letters.   More