Climate

Ice RiversJemma WadhamPrinceton Univ., $26.95

I’ve always been a sucker for glacier lingo, whimsical words for a harsh landscape gouged, smoothed and bulldozed by ice. Moulins, drumlins, eskers and moraines. Cirques and arêtes. Cold katabatic winds blowing down a mountain, huffed from a glacier’s snout and said to be its spirit.

Jemma Wadham’s Ice Rivers: A Story of Glaciers, Wilderness, and Humanity leans into this duality of whimsy and harshness, cheerfully pulling readers into this strange, icy world. Wadham, a glaciologist at the University of Bristol in England, confesses that her goal is to give readers a sense of connection to glaciers, which she knowingly anthropomorphizes: In her writing, glaciers have heavy bodies, dirty snouts and veins filled with water.

“When I’m with them, I feel like I’m among friends,” she writes. “It is, in many ways, a love story.” And knowing the glaciers, she reasons — perhaps coming to love them — is key to trying to save them.

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Accordingly, the book’s chapters are anchored by site, and each chapter documents a different field expedition or series of expeditions to a particular glacier. Wadham takes us from the Swiss Alps to Norway’s Svalbard islands, from India’s Himalayas to Antarctica’s McMurdo Dry Valleys. It’s a breezy read, with an eager party host vibe (“let me introduce to you my friend the glacier; I think you two will get along”).

While describing each site, Wadham dives into an engaging mishmash of personal recollections about her fieldwork, snippets of accessible glacier and climate science (I now know that these rivers of ice have three different manners of flow), a dash of alpine and polar exploration history, and many bits of local color. Ötzi the 5,300-year-old iceman, Erik the Red, Svalbard’s many polar bears and wild Patagonian horses all make an appearance, not to mention the mummified corpses of seals and penguins littering the Dry Valleys (SN: 7/12/18).

An interesting thread winding through the book concerns how the focus of glaciology as a field has shifted through time. After several years of not winning grants that would allow her to continue working on Svalbard, in 2008 Wadham got the opportunity to go to Greenland instead. “Valley glaciers were no longer considered quite as cutting-edge to the research council funders,” she writes. “Instead, glaciologists had become obsessed with the vast ice sheets,” for the potential of their meltwaters to raise sea levels and alter ocean currents. Several years later, funders began to call for projects looking at melting glaciers’ impacts on ocean life and the water cycle, opening up an opportunity for Wadham to study Patagonia’s fast-changing glacial region.

Where the book really comes alive is in its vivid snapshots of a scientist’s life in the field: making a bleary-eyed cup of coffee in Patagonia using a thin sock as a filter; fearfully skittering across fragile fjord ice on a Ski-Doo; consuming tins of bland fiskeboller, or fish balls, which were mostly used for food but sometimes for rifle practice; solo dancing away a gray mood on a pebbly beach on Svalbard, with a rifle ready to repel polar bears resting nearby on the stones.

These recollections are honest, funny and poignant, and reveal how the highs and lows of fieldwork are inextricably intertwined. Wadham writes, for example, of dreading the “hollow feeling caused by constant sleep deprivation” due to the midnight sun and the relentless roaring of winds and water, a feeling tempered by her fierce love for the open expanses of the wild and for pursuing a “big mission.”

She also writes wistfully of the “communal mirth of field-camp life” where she had never laughed as much before and, less wistfully, of the heavy, claustrophobic atmosphere of an Antarctic research station with its supercharged heating system and extreme politeness over meals with strangers. Against the backdrop of Patagonia’s swiftly shrinking glaciers, Wadham comes to grips with difficult personal losses, even as she wrestles with mysterious headaches. Months later, while recovering from emergency brain surgery, she secretly begins to write about her glaciers. Still more months pass before she finds her way back to the ice, this time in the Peruvian Andes.

“I quickly realized one key thing about fieldwork — if you think you are there to work, you’re gravely mistaken,” Wadham writes. “You’re actually there to survive, and perform some research along the way — if you’re lucky.… In some ways I found all this ‘surviving’ a grounding process.”

Every glacier Wadham has studied has shrunk since she first set foot on the ice over a quarter century ago. But Ice Rivers isn’t focused on mourning those glaciers so much as on celebrating the peace and purpose — the grounding line — Wadham found in them. It certainly makes me want to know them better.

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Under a midday summer sun in California’s Sacramento Valley, rice farmer Peter Rystrom walks across a dusty, barren plot of land, parched soil crunching beneath each step.

In a typical year, he’d be sloshing through inches of water amid lush, green rice plants. But today the soil lies naked and baking in the 35˚ Celsius (95˚ Fahrenheit) heat during a devastating drought that has hit most of the western United States. The drought started in early 2020, and conditions have become progressively drier.

Low water levels in reservoirs and rivers have forced farmers like Rystrom, whose family has been growing rice on this land for four generations, to slash their water use.

Rystrom stops and looks around. “We’ve had to cut back between 25 and 50 percent.” He’s relatively lucky. In some parts of the Sacramento Valley, depending on water rights, he says, farmers received no water this season.

California is the second-largest U.S. producer of rice, after Arkansas, and over 95 percent of California’s rice is grown within about 160 kilometers of Sacramento. To the city’s east rise the peaks of the Sierra Nevada, which means “snowy mountains” in Spanish. Rice growers in the valley below count on the range to live up to its name each winter. In spring, melting snowpack flows into rivers and reservoirs, and then through an intricate network of canals and drainages to rice fields that farmers irrigate in a shallow inundation from April or May to September or October.

If too little snow falls in those mountains, farmers like Rystrom are forced to leave fields unplanted. On April 1 this year, the date when California’s snowpack is usually at its deepest, it held about 40 percent less water than average, according to the California Department of Water Resources. On August 4, Lake Oroville, which supplies Rystrom and other local rice farmers with irrigation water, was at its lowest level on record.

Drought in the Sacramento Valley has forced Peter Rystrom and other rice farmers to leave swaths of land barren.N. Ogasa

Not too long ago, the opposite — too much rain — stopped Rystrom and others from planting. “In 2017 and 2019, we were leaving ground out because of flood. We couldn’t plant,” he says. Tractors couldn’t move through the muddy, clay-rich soil to prepare the fields for seeding.

Climate change is expected to worsen the state’s extreme swings in precipitation, researchers reported in 2018 in Nature Climate Change. This “climate whiplash” looms over Rystrom and the other 2,500 or so rice producers in the Golden State. “They’re talking about less and less snowpack, and more concentrated bursts of rain,” Rystrom says. “It’s really concerning.”

Farmers in China, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Vietnam — the biggest rice-growing countries — as well as in Nigeria, Africa’s largest rice producer — also worry about the damage climate change will do to rice production. More than 3.5 billion people get 20 percent or more of their calories from the fluffy grains. And demand is increasing in Asia, Latin America and especially in Africa.

To save and even boost production, rice growers, engineers and researchers have turned to water-saving irrigation routines and rice gene banks that store hundreds of thousands of varieties ready to be distributed or bred into new, climate-resilient forms. With climate change accelerating, and researchers raising the alarm about related threats, such as arsenic contamination and bacterial diseases, the demand for innovation grows.

“If we lose our rice crop, we’re not going to be eating,” says plant geneticist Pamela Ronald of the University of California, Davis. Climate change is already threatening rice-growing regions around the world, says Ronald, who identifies genes in rice that help the plant withstand disease and floods. “This is not a future problem. This is happening now.”

Saltwater woes

Most rice plants are grown in fields, or paddies, that are typically filled with around 10 centimeters of water. This constant, shallow inundation helps stave off weeds and pests. But if water levels suddenly get too high, such as during a flash flood, the rice plants can die.

Striking the right balance between too much and too little water can be a struggle for many rice farmers, especially in Asia, where over 90 percent of the world’s rice is produced. Large river deltas in South and Southeast Asia, such as the Mekong River Delta in Vietnam, offer flat, fertile land that is ideal for farming rice. But these low-lying areas are sensitive to swings in the water cycle. And because deltas sit on the coast, drought brings another threat: salt.

Salt’s impact is glaringly apparent in the Mekong River Delta. When the river runs low, saltwater from the South China Sea encroaches upstream into the delta, where it can creep into the soils and irrigation canals of the delta’s rice fields.

In Vietnam’s Mekong River Delta, farmers pull dead rice plants from a paddy that was contaminated by saltwater intrusion from the South China Sea, which can happen during a drought.HOANG DINH NAM/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

“If you irrigate rice with water that’s too salty, especially at certain [growing] stages, you are at risk of losing 100 percent of the crop,” says Bjoern Sander, a climate change specialist at the International Rice Research Institute, or IRRI, who is based in Vietnam.

In a 2015 and 2016 drought, saltwater reached up to 90 kilometers inland, destroying 405,000 hectares of rice paddies. In 2019 and 2020, drought and saltwater intrusion returned, damaging 58,000 hectares of rice. With regional temperatures on the rise, these conditions in Southeast Asia are expected to intensify and become more widespread, according to a 2020 report by the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific.

Then comes the whiplash: Each year from around April to October, the summer monsoon turns on the faucet over swaths of South and Southeast Asia. About 80 percent of South Asia’s rainfall is dumped during this season and can cause destructive flash floods.

Bangladesh is one of the most flood-prone rice producers in the region, as it sits at the mouths of the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna rivers. In June 2020, monsoon rains flooded about 37 percent of the country, damaging about 83,000 hectares of rice fields, according to Bangladesh’s Ministry of Agriculture. And the future holds little relief; South Asia’s monsoon rainfall is expected to intensify with climate change, researchers reported June 4 in Science Advances.

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A hot mess

Water highs and lows aren’t the entire story. Rice generally grows best in places with hot days and cooler nights. But in many rice-growing regions, temperatures are getting too hot. Rice plants become most vulnerable to heat stress during the middle phase of their growth, before they begin building up the meat in their grains. Extreme heat, above 35˚ C, can diminish grain counts in just weeks, or even days. In April in Bangladesh, two consecutive days of 36˚ C destroyed thousands of hectares of rice.

In South and Southeast Asia, such extreme heat events are expected to become common with climate change, researchers reported in July in Earth’s Future. And there are other, less obvious, consequences for rice in a warming world.

One of the greatest threats is bacterial blight, a fatal plant disease caused by the bacterium Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae. The disease, most prevalent in Southeast Asia and rising in Africa, has been reported to have cut rice yields by up to 70 percent in a single season.

“We know that with higher temperature, the disease becomes worse,” says Jan Leach, a plant pathologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. Most of the genes that help rice combat bacterial blight seem to become less effective when temperatures rise, she explains.

And as the world warms, new frontiers may open for rice pathogens. An August study in Nature Climate Change suggests that as global temperatures rise, rice plants (and many other crops) at northern latitudes, such as those in China and the United States, will be at higher risk of pathogen infection.

Meanwhile, rising temperatures may bring a double-edged arsenic problem. In a 2019 study in Nature Communications, E. Marie Muehe, a biogeochemist at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig, Germany, who was then at Stanford University, showed that under future climate conditions, more arsenic will infiltrate rice plants. High arsenic levels boost the health risk of eating the rice and impair plant growth.

Arsenic naturally occurs in soils, though in most regions the toxic element is present at very low levels. Rice, however, is particularly susceptible to arsenic contamination, because it is grown in flooded conditions. Paddy soils lack oxygen, and the microbes that thrive in this anoxic environment liberate arsenic from the soil. Once the arsenic is in the water, rice plants can draw it in through their roots. From there, the element is distributed throughout the plants’ tissues and grains.

Muehe and her team grew a Californian variety of rice in a local low-arsenic soil inside climate-controlled greenhouses. Increasing the temperature and carbon dioxide levels to match future climate scenarios enhanced the activity of the microbes living in the rice paddy soils and increased the amount of arsenic in the grains, Muehe says. And importantly, rice yields diminished. In the low-arsenic Californian soil under future climate conditions, rice yield dropped 16 percent.

According to the researchers, models that forecast the future production of rice don’t account for the impact of arsenic on harvest yields. What that means, Muehe says, is that current projections are overestimating how much rice will be produced in the future.

Managing rice’s thirst

From atop an embankment that edges one of his fields, Rystrom watches water gush from a pipe, flooding a paddy packed with rice plants. “On a year like this, we decided to pump,” he says.

Able to tap into groundwater, Rystrom left only about 10 percent of his fields unplanted this growing season. “If everybody was pumping from the ground to farm rice every year,” he admits, it would be unsustainable.

One widely studied, drought-friendly method is “alternate wetting and drying,” or intermittent flooding, which involves flooding and draining rice paddies on one- to 10-day cycles, as opposed to maintaining a constant inundation. This practice can cut water use by up to 38 percent without sacrificing yields. It also stabilizes the soil for harvesting and lowers arsenic levels in rice by bringing more oxygen into the soils, disrupting the arsenic-releasing microbes. If tuned just right, it may even slightly improve crop yields.

But the water-saving benefits of this method are greatest when it is used on highly permeable soils, such as those in Arkansas and other parts of the U.S. South, which normally require lots of water to keep flooded, says Bruce Linquist, a rice specialist at the University of California Cooperative Extension. The Sacramento Valley’s clay-rich soils don’t drain well, so the water savings where Rystrom farms are minimal; he doesn’t use the method.

Building embankments, canal systems and reservoirs can also help farmers dampen the volatility of the water cycle. But for some, the solution to rice’s climate-related problems lies in enhancing the plant itself.

Fourth-generation rice farmer Peter Rystrom (left) stands with his grandfather Don Rystrom (middle) and his father Steve Rystrom (right).CALIFORNIA RICE COMMISSION, BRIAN BAER

Better breeds

The world’s largest collection of rice is stored near the southern rim of Laguna de Bay in the Philippines, in the city of Los Baños. There, the International Rice Genebank, managed by IRRI, holds over 132,000 varieties of rice seeds from farms around the globe.

Upon arrival in Los Baños, those seeds are dried and processed, placed in paper bags and moved into two storage facilities — one cooled to 2˚ to 4˚ C from which seeds can be readily withdrawn, and another chilled to –20˚ C for long-term storage. To be extra safe, backup seeds are kept at the National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation in Fort Collins, Colo., and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault tucked inside a mountain in Norway.

All this is done to protect the biodiversity of rice and amass a trove of genetic material that can be used to breed future generations of rice. Farmers no longer use many of the stored varieties, instead opting for new higher-yield or sturdier breeds. Nevertheless, solutions to climate-related problems may be hidden in the DNA of those older strains. “Scientists are always looking through that collection to see if genes can be discovered that aren’t being used right now,” says Ronald, of UC Davis. “That’s how Sub1 was discovered.”

Over 132,000 varieties of rice seeds fill the shelves of the climate-controlled International Rice Genebank. Breeders from around the world can use the seeds to develop new climate-resilient rice strains.IRRI/FLICKR (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

The Sub1 gene enables rice plants to endure prolonged periods completely submerged underwater. It was discovered in 1996 in a traditional variety of rice grown in the Indian state of Orissa, and through breeding has been incorporated into varieties cultivated in flood-prone regions of South and Southeast Asia. Sub1-wielding varieties, called “scuba rice,” can survive for over two weeks entirely submerged, a boon for farmers whose fields are vulnerable to flash floods.

Some researchers are looking beyond the genetic variability preserved in rice gene banks, searching instead for useful genes from other species, including plants and bacteria. But inserting genes from one species into another, or genetic modification, remains controversial. The most famous example of genetically modified rice is Golden Rice, which was intended as a partial solution to childhood malnutrition. Golden Rice grains are enriched in beta-carotene, a precursor to vitamin A. To create the rice, researchers spliced a gene from a daffodil and another from a bacterium into an Asian variety of rice.

Three decades have passed since its initial development, and only a handful of countries have deemed Golden Rice safe for consumption. On July 23, the Philippines became the first country to approve the commercial production of Golden Rice. Abdelbagi Ismail, principal scientist at IRRI, blames the slow acceptance on public perception and commercial interests opposed to genetically modified organisms, or GMOs (SN: 2/6/16, p. 22).

Looking ahead, it will be crucial for countries to embrace GM rice, Ismail says. Developing nations, particularly those in Africa that are becoming more dependent on the crop, would benefit greatly from the technology, which could produce new varieties faster than breeding and may allow researchers to incorporate traits into rice plants that conventional breeding cannot. If Golden Rice were to gain worldwide acceptance, it could open the door for new genetically modified climate- and disease-resilient varieties, Ismail says. “It will take time,” he says. “But it will happen.”

Climate change is a many-headed beast, and each rice-growing region will face its own particular set of problems. Solving those problems will require collaboration between local farmers, government officials and the international community of researchers.

“I want my kids to be able to have a shot at this,” Rystrom says. “You have to do a lot more than just farm rice. You have to think generations ahead.” More

The severe, devastating wildfires that raged across southeastern Australia in late 2019 and early 2020 packed a powerful punch that extended far beyond the country, two new studies find.

The blazes injected at least twice as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as was previously thought, one team’s satellite-derived estimates revealed. The fires also sent up vast clouds of smoke and ash that wafted far to the east over the Southern Ocean, fertilizing the waters with nutrients and triggering widespread blooms of microscopic marine algae called phytoplankton, another team found. Both studies were published online September 15 in Nature.

Meteorologist Ivar van der Velde of the SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research in Leiden and colleagues first examined carbon monoxide data collected over southeastern Australia by the satellite-based instrument TROPOMI from November 2019 to January 2020, during the worst of the fires. Then, to get new estimates of the carbon dioxide emissions attributable to the fires, the team used previously determined ratios of carbon monoxide to carbon dioxide emitted by the region’s eucalyptus forests — the predominant type of forest that was scorched in the blazes — during earlier wildfires and prescribed burns.

Van der Velde’s team estimates that the fires released from 517 trillion to 867 trillion grams of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. “The sheer magnitude of CO2 that was emitted to the atmosphere … was much larger than what we initially thought it would be,” van der Velde says. The emissions “from this single event were significantly higher than what all Australians normally emit with the combustion of fossil fuels in an entire year.”

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Previous assessments of CO2 emissions from the fires, based on estimations of burned area and biomass consumed by the blazes, calculated an average of about 275 trillion grams. Using the satellite-derived carbon monoxide data, the researchers say, dramatically improves the ability to distinguish actual emissions from the fires from other background sources of the gases, giving a more accurate assessment.

That finding has worrisome implications. The fires swiftly cut a swath through southeastern Australia’s eucalyptus forests, devastating the forests to a degree that made their rapid recovery more difficult — which in turn affects how much carbon the trees can sequester, van der Velde says (SN: 3/9/21). Fires in northern and central Australia’s dry, grassy savannas are seen as more climate neutral because the grasses can regrow more quickly, he says.

And severe fire seasons are likely to become more common in southeastern Australia with ongoing climate change. Climate change has already increased the likelihood of severe fire events such as the 2019–2020 fire season by at least 30 percent (SN: 3/4/20).

The smoke and ash from the fires also packed a powerful punch. Scientists watched in awe as the fires created a “super outbreak” of towering thunderclouds from December 29 to December 31 in 2019 (SN: 12/15/20). These clouds spewed tiny aerosol particles of ash and smoke high into the stratosphere.

Aerosols from the fires also traveled eastward through the lower atmosphere, ultimately reaching the Southern Ocean where they triggered blooms of phytoplankton in its iron-starved waters. Geochemist Weiyi Tang, now at Princeton University, and colleagues analyzed aerosols from the fires and found the particles to be rich in iron, an important nutrient for the algae. By tracing the atmospheric paths of the cloud of ash and smoke across the ocean, the team was able to link the observed blooms — huge patches of chlorophyll detected by satellite — to the fires.

A satellite image snapped on January 6, 2020, shows smoke from southeastern Australia’s wildfires wafting eastward over the Southern Ocean.Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communication Technology

Researchers have long thought that fires can trigger ocean blooms, particularly in the Southern Ocean, under the right conditions, says marine biogeochemist Joan Llort, now at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and a coauthor on the study. But this research marks the most direct observation ever made of such an event — in part because it was such a massive one, Llort says.

Large ocean blooms are “yet another process which is potentially being modified by climate change,” says biogeochemist Nicolas Cassar of Duke University, also a coauthor on the study.

One of the big questions to emerge from the study, Cassar adds, is just how much carbon these phytoplankton may have ultimately removed from the atmosphere as they bloomed. Some of the carbon that the algae draw out of the air through photosynthesis sinks with them to the seafloor as they die. But some of it is quickly respired back to the atmosphere, muting any mitigating effect that the blooms might have on the wildfire emissions. To really assess what role the algae play, he says, would require a rapid-response team aboard an ocean vessel that could measure these chemical processes as they are happening.

The sheer size of this wildfire-triggered bloom — “larger than Australia itself” — shows that “wildfires have the potential to increase marine productivity by very large amounts,” says Douglas Hamilton, a climate scientist at Cornell University who was not connected with the study.

“The impact of fires on society is not straightforward,” Hamilton adds. The same smoke that can cause severe health impacts when inhaled “is also supplying nutrients to ecosystems and helping support marine food webs.” What this study demonstrates, he adds, is that to understand how future increases in fire activity might help shape the future of marine productivity “it is crucial that we monitor the impacts closely now.” More

Climate change has increased the likelihood of heavy downpours in Western Europe such as the July rains that led to devastating flash floods, researchers affiliated with the World Weather Attribution network report August 23. Such extreme rains are 1.2 to 9 times more likely to happen — and those downpours are 3 to 19 percent heavier — as a result of human-caused climate change, the team found.

The World Weather Attribution conducts quick analyses of extreme events to assess the contribution of climate change (SN: 7/7/21). The new study focused on two regions where record-setting rains fell July 12–15 and triggered floods that killed more than 200 people.

In a single day, an average 93 millimeters of rain fell near Germany’s Ahr and Erft rivers; in just two days, 106 millimeters of rain fell in Belgium’s Meuse River region. With many river measurement stations destroyed, the researchers focused on assessing the contribution of climate change to the intense rainfall using climate simulations comparing conditions with and without human-caused climate change.

That intense rainfall might occur once every 400 years under current climate conditions, but those odds are likely to increase as the world continues to warm, said coauthor Maarten van Aalst on August 23 at a news conference on the report. It’s “still a rare event, but a rare event we should prepare for,” said van Aalst, a climate and disaster risk researcher at the University of Twente in the Netherlands and the director of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre.

That finding is consistent with data cited in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth assessment report, which notes that as global temperatures continue to rise, western and central Europe will see more intense rainfall events (SN: 8/9/21). More

The science is unequivocal: Humans are dramatically overhauling Earth’s climate. The effects of climate change are now found everywhere around the globe and are intensifying rapidly, states a sweeping new analysis released August 9 by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. And the window to reverse some of these effects is closing.

“There is no room for doubt any longer” about humans’ responsibility for current climate change, says Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at Georgia Tech in Atlanta and an author on the first chapter of the report. “And now we can say quite definitely that a whole class of extreme [events]” is linked to human-caused climate change.

Climate change is already affecting every region on Earth in multiple ways, from drought and fire conditions in the U.S. West to heat waves in Europe and flooding in Asia, the report notes  (SN: 7/7/21). Each of the past four decades has been the warmest on record since preindustrial times (SN: 5/26/21).

The study also looks at several different scenarios of greenhouse gas warming, including perhaps the most hopeful scenarios in which by 2050 the world achieves “net zero” carbon emissions, where emitted gases are balanced by carbon removal from the atmosphere.

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If the world gets down to net-zero emissions, the decades afterward hold “hints of light,” says Baylor Fox-Kemper, an oceanographer at Brown University in Providence, R.I., and the coordinating lead author of the new report’s chapter on oceans and Earth’s icy regions. “Temperatures come back down a little — not all the way back to preindustrial times, but there’s a little recovery.”

But other changes are irreversible on near-future timescales — that is, the next century or more, Fox-Kemper says. Even in those mid-century net-zero emissions scenarios, “it’s still pretty bad,” he says. Sea levels, for example, will continue to rise until about the year 2300, driven in part by the juggernaut of Greenland’s melting ice sheet (SN: 9/30/20). “We may have already crossed [the] threshold beyond which Greenland’s melting could be stopped,” he says. Still, swift and deep emissions reductions would significantly slow how much sea levels will rise by the end of the century, the report finds.

The new analysis is the sixth in a series of massive assessment reports undertaken by the IPCC since 1990. In each report, hundreds of scientists from around the world analyze the findings of thousands of studies to form a consensus picture of how Earth’s climate is changing and what role people play in those changes.

“The key message [of this report] is still the same as was first published in 1990 … human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases pose a threat for humans’ well-being and the biosphere,” said Petteri Taalas, Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization, at an event announcing the report’s release August 9.

But researchers understand climate change far better now than they did in 1990, when the first assessment report was released. In the last three decades, new findings have poured in from tens of thousands more observing stations, from a wealth of satellite instruments, and from dramatically improved climate simulations (SN: 1/7/20).

The IPCC’s fifth assessment report, released in several parts during 2013 and 2014, was itself a game changer. It was the first to state that greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are driving climate change — a conclusion that set the stage for 195 nations to agree in Paris in 2015 to curb those emissions (SN: 4/13/14; SN: 12/12/15).

The Paris Agreement set a target of limiting the global average temperature to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial times. But many island nations and others most threatened by climate change feared that this target wasn’t stringent enough. So in an unprecedented step, the U.N. commissioned a report by the IPCC to compare how a future Earth might look if warming were limited to just 1.5 degrees Celsius instead.

The Dixie Fire, the largest individual wildfire in California’s history, started on July 13, 2021 and left the town of Greenville, including its library (shown) in ruins. The IPCC’s sixth assessment report finds that humans are unequivocally responsible for the planet’s rising temperatures since the late 1800s, and links these changes to extreme weather including wildfires, drought, heat waves, extreme precipitation and properties of tropical cyclones. Trevor Bexon/Getty Images

That special report, released in 2018, revealed in fine detail how just half a degree of extra warming by 2100 could matter, from the increased likelihood of heat waves to higher sea levels (SN: 12/17/18). The one-two punch of those concrete findings and scorching temperatures in 2019 grabbed the attention of public and policy makers alike.

Scientists were surprised by how hard the 1.5 degree report landed. “Even for me,” says Ko Barrett, vice chair of the IPCC and a senior advisor for climate at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “a person who has dedicated my entire professional career to addressing climate change, the report caused me to rethink my personal contribution to the climate problem. Climate change was not some distant temperature target to be hit in the ethereal future. It was close; it was now.”

IPCC scientists hope the new report, with its powerful emphasis on the regional and local effects of climate change — fully a third of the report is devoted to outlining those — will have a similar impact. And its timing is significant. Beginning October 31, heads of state from around the world are scheduled to meet in Glasgow, Scotland, to discuss updated — and hopefully increasingly ambitious — plans to reduce emissions to meet the targets of the 2015 Paris Agreement. 

With previous reports, “the world listened, but it didn’t hear. Or the world listened, but it didn’t act strongly enough,” said Inger Andersen, executive director of the U.N. Environment Programme, at the Aug. 9 event for the report’s release. “We certainly urge them … to listen to the facts on the table now.” More

The westward journey of the mighty Yukon River takes it from its headwaters in Canada’s British Columbia straight across Alaska. The river has many stories to tell, of generations of Indigenous people hunting on its banks and fishing in its waters, of paddle-wheeled boats and gold panning and pipelines.

Where it meets the Bering Sea, the river fans out into an intricate delta resembling cauliflower lobes of river channels and ponds. The delta has a story to tell, too — that of an increasingly green Arctic.

A composite image of the delta’s northern lobe, taken May 29 by the U.S. Geological Survey’s Landsat 8 satellite, shows willow shrublands lining river channels as they wind toward the sea. Farther inland, tussock grasses carpet the tundra. Grasslike sedge meadows populate low-lying wetlands, punctuated by ponds left behind by springtime floods along the riverbanks from snow and ice that have melted upstream.

In southern Alaska, such as in the Kenai Peninsula, the Arctic has been getting noticeably greener since the 1980s, as global temperatures climb (SN: 4/11/19). Researchers observed this change using satellite measurements of red and near-infrared light reflected off the vegetation. Now, analyses of changing vegetation in the Yukon Delta and nearby Kuskokwim Delta show that more northern areas are getting greener too, researchers report June 1 in Earth Interactions.

The increasing prevalence of tall willows, an important moose habitat, is one sign of these changes in the delta. Moose populations, too, are on the rise. But for the Yukon and other Arctic deltas — where higher floodwaters due to climate change are likely to deposit thicker sediment piles, supporting more greenery — many more changes are likely to come as the planet warms.  More

Climate change is helping Atlantic hurricanes pack more of a punch, making them rainier, intensifying them faster and helping the storms linger longer even after landfall. But a new statistical analysis of historical records and satellite data suggests that there aren’t actually more Atlantic hurricanes now than there were roughly 150 years ago, researchers report July 13 in Nature Communications.

The record-breaking number of Atlantic hurricanes in 2020, a whopping 30 named storms, led to intense speculation over whether and how climate change was involved (SN: 12/21/20). It’s a question that scientists continue to grapple with, says Gabriel Vecchi, a climate scientist at Princeton University. “What is the impact of global warming — past impact and also our future impact — on the number and intensity of hurricanes and tropical storms?”

Satellite records over the last 30 years allow us to say “with little ambiguity how many hurricanes, and how many major hurricanes [Category 3 and above] there were each year,” Vecchi says. Those data clearly show that the number, intensity and speed of intensification of hurricanes has increased over that time span.

But “there are a lot of things that have happened over the last 30 years” that can influence that trend, he adds. “Global warming is one of them.” Decreasing aerosol pollution is another (SN: 11/21/19). The amount of soot and sulfate particles and dust over the Atlantic Ocean was much higher in the mid-20th century than now; by blocking and scattering sunlight, those particles temporarily cooled the planet enough to counteract greenhouse gas warming. That cooling is also thought to have helped temporarily suppress hurricane activity in the Atlantic.  

To get a longer-term perspective on trends in Atlantic storms, Vecchi and colleagues examined a dataset of hurricane observations from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that stretches from 1851 to 2019. It includes old-school observations by unlucky souls who directly observed the tempests as well as remote sensing data from the modern satellite era.

How to directly compare those different types of observations to get an accurate trend was a challenge. Satellites, for example, can see every storm, but earlier observations will count only the storms that people directly experienced. So the researchers took a probabilistic approach to fill in likely gaps in the older record, assuming, for example, that modern storm tracks are representative of pre-satellite storm tracks to account for storms that would have stayed out at sea and unseen. The team found no clear increase in the number of storms in the Atlantic over that 168-year time frame. One possible reason for this, the researchers say, is a rebound from the aerosol pollution–induced lull in storms that may be obscuring some of the greenhouse gas signal in the data.  

More surprisingly — even to Vecchi, he says — the data also seem to show no significant increase in hurricane intensity over that time. That’s despite “scientific consistency between theories and models indicating that the typical intensity of hurricanes is more likely to increase as the planet warms,” Vecchi says. But this conclusion is heavily caveated — and the study also doesn’t provide evidence against the hypothesis that global warming “has acted and will act to intensify hurricane activity,” he adds.

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Climate scientists were already familiar with the possibility that storm frequency might not have increased much in the last 150 or so years — or over much longer timescales. The link between number of storms and warming has long been uncertain, as the changing climate also produces complex shifts in atmospheric patterns that could take the hurricane trend in either direction. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change noted in a 2012 report that there is “low confidence” that tropical cyclone activity has increased in the long term.

Geologic evidence of Atlantic storm frequency, which can go back over 1,000 years, also suggests that hurricane frequency does tend to wax and wane every few decades, says Elizabeth Wallace, a paleotempestologist at Rice University in Houston (SN: 10/22/17).

Wallace hunts for hurricane records in deep underwater caverns called blue holes: As a storm passes over an island beach or the barely submerged shallows, winds and waves pick up sand that then can get dumped into these caverns, forming telltale sediment deposits. Her data, she says, also suggest that “the past 150 years hasn’t been exceptional [in storm frequency], compared to the past.”

But, Wallace notes, these deposits don’t reveal anything about whether climate change is producing more intense hurricanes. And modern observational data on changes in hurricane intensity is muddled by its own uncertainties, particularly the fact that the satellite record just isn’t that long. Still, “I liked that the study says it doesn’t necessarily provide evidence against the hypothesis” that higher sea-surface temperatures would increase hurricane intensity by adding more energy to the storm, she says.

Kerry Emanuel, an atmospheric scientist at MIT, says the idea that storm numbers haven’t increased isn’t surprising, given the longstanding uncertainty over how global warming might alter that. But “one reservation I have about the new paper is the implication that no significant trends in Atlantic hurricane metrics [going back to 1851] implies no effect of global warming on these storms,” he says. Looking for such a long-term trend isn’t actually that meaningful, he says, as scientists wouldn’t expect to see any global warming-related hurricane trends become apparent until about the 1970s anyway, as warming has ramped up.

Regardless of whether there are more of these storms, there’s no question that modern hurricanes have become more deadly in many ways, Vecchi says. There’s evidence that global warming has already been increasing the amount of rain from some storms, such as Hurricane Harvey in 2017, which led to widespread, devastating flooding (SN: 9/28/18). And, Vecchi says, “sea level will rise over the coming century … so [increasing] storm surge is one big hazard from hurricanes.” More

Between a death and a burial was hardly the best time to show up in a remote village in Madagascar to make a pitch for forest protection. Bad timing, however, turned out to be the easy problem.

This forest was the first one that botanist Armand Randrianasolo had tried to protect. He’s the first native of Madagascar to become a Ph.D. taxonomist at Missouri Botanical Garden, or MBG, in St. Louis. So he was picked to join a 2002 scouting trip to choose a conservation site.

Other groups had already come into the country and protected swaths of green, focusing on “big forests; big, big, big!” Randrianasolo says. Preferably forests with lots of big-eyed, fluffy lemurs to tug heartstrings elsewhere in the world.

The Missouri group, however, planned to go small and to focus on the island’s plants, legendary among botanists but less likely to be loved as a stuffed cuddly. The team zeroed in on fragments of humid forest that thrive on sand along the eastern coast. “Nobody was working on it,” he says.

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As the people of the Agnalazaha forest were mourning a member of their close-knit community, Randrianasolo decided to pay his respects: “I wanted to show that I’m still Malagasy,” he says. He had grown up in a seaside community to the north.

The village was filling up with visiting relatives and acquaintances, a great chance to talk with many people in the region. The deputy mayor conceded that after a morning visit to the bereaved, Randrianasolo and MBG’s Chris Birkinshaw could speak in the afternoon with anyone wishing to gather at the roofed marketplace.

Courtesy of the staff of the Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis and Madagascar

Courtesy of the staff of the Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis and Madagascar

Courtesy of the staff of the Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis and Madagascar

Conserving natural forests is a double win for trapping carbon and saving rich biodiversity. Forests matter to humans (with a Treculia fruit), Phromnia planthoppers and mouse lemurs.

The two scientists didn’t get the reception they’d hoped for. Their pitch to help the villagers conserve their forest while still serving people’s needs met protests from the crowd: “You’re lying!”

The community was still upset about a different forest that outside conservationists had protected. The villagers had assumed they would still be able to take trees for lumber, harvest their medicinal plants or sell other bits from the forest during cash emergencies. They were wrong. That place was now off-limits. People caught doing any of the normal things a forest community does would be considered poachers. When MBG proposed conserving yet more land, residents weren’t about to get tricked again. “This is the only forest we have left,” they told the scientists.

Finding some way out of such clashes to save existing forests has become crucial for fighting climate change. Between 2001 and 2019, the planet’s forests trapped an estimated 7.6 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide a year, an international team reported in Nature Climate Change in March. That rough accounting suggests trees may capture about one and a half times the annual emissions of the United States, one of the largest global emitters.

Planting trees by the millions and trillions is basking in round-the-world enthusiasm right now. Yet saving the forests we already have ranks higher in priority and in payoff, say a variety of scientists.

How to preserve forests may be a harder question than why. Success takes strong legal protections with full government support. It also takes a village, literally. A forest’s most intimate neighbors must wholeheartedly want it saved, one generation after another. That theme repeats in places as different as rural Madagascar and suburban New Jersey.

Overlooked and underprotected

First a word about trees themselves. Of course, trees capture carbon and fight climate change. But trees are much more than useful wooden objects that happen to be leafy, self-manufacturing and great shade for picnics.

“Plant blindness,” as it has been called, reduces trees and other photosynthetic organisms to background, lamented botanist Sandra Knapp in a 2019 article in the journal Plants, People, Planet. For instance, show people a picture with a squirrel in a forest. They’ll likely say something like “cute squirrel.” Not “nice-size beech tree, and is that a young black oak with a cute squirrel on it?”

This tunnel vision also excludes invertebrates, argues Knapp, of the Natural History Museum in London, complicating efforts to save nature. These half-seen forests, natural plus human-planted, now cover close to a third of the planet’s land, according to the 2020 version of The State of the World’s Forests report from the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization. Yet a calculation based on the report’s numbers says that over the last 10 years, net tree cover vanished at an average rate of about 12,990 hectares — a bit more than the area of San Francisco — every day.

This is an improvement over the previous decades, the report notes. In the 1990s, deforestation, on average, destroyed about 1.75 San Francisco equivalents of forest every day.

Branches of a Dracaena cinnabari dragon’s blood tree from Yemen ooze red sap and repeatedly bifurcate in even Y-splits.BORIS KHVOSTICHENKO/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Trees were the planet’s skyscrapers, many rising to great heights, hundreds of millions of years before humans began piling stone upon stone to build their own. Trees reach their stature by growing and then killing their innermost core of tissue. The still-living outer rim of the tree uses its ever-increasing inner ghost architecture as plumbing pipes that can function as long as several human lifetimes. And tree sex lives, oh my. Plants invented “steamy but not touchy” long before the Victorian novel — much flowering, perfuming and maybe green yearning, all without direct contact of reproductive organs. Just a dusting of pollen wafted on a breeze or delivered by a bee.

To achieve the all-important goal of cutting global emissions, saving the natural forests already in the ground must be a priority, 14 scientists from around the world wrote in the April Global Change Biology. “Protect existing forests first,” coauthor Kate Hardwick of Kew Gardens in London said during a virtual conference on reforestation in February. That priority also gives the planet’s magnificent biodiversity a better chance at surviving. Trees can store a lot of carbon in racing to the sky. And size and age matter because trees add carbon over so much of their architecture, says ecologist David Mildrexler with Eastern Oregon Legacy Lands at the Wallowology Natural History Discovery Center in Joseph. Trees don’t just start new growth at twigs tipped with unfurling baby leaves. Inside the branches, the trunk and big roots, an actively growing sheath surrounds the inner ghost plumbing. Each season, this whole sheath adds a layer of carbon-capturing tissue from root to crown.

“Imagine you’re standing in front of a really big tree — one that’s so big you can’t even wrap your arms all the way around, and you look up the trunk,” Mildrexler says. Compare that sky-touching vision to the area covered in a year’s growth of some sapling, maybe three fingers thick and human height. “The difference is, of course, just huge,” he says.

Big trees may not be common, but they make an outsize difference in trapping carbon, Mildrexler and colleagues have found. In six Pacific Northwest national forests, only about 3 percent of all the trees in the study, including ponderosa pines, western larches and three other major species, reached full-arm-hug size (at least 53.3 centimeters in diameter). Yet this 3 percent of trees stored 42 percent of the aboveground carbon there, the team reported in 2020 in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change. An earlier study, with 48 sites worldwide and more than 5 million tree trunks, found that the largest 1 percent of trees store about 50 percent of the aboveground carbon-filled biomass.

Plant paradise

The island nation of Madagascar was an irresistible place for the Missouri Botanical Garden to start trying to conserve forests. Off the east coast of Africa, the island stretches more than the distance from Savannah, Ga., to Toronto, and holds more than 12,000 named species of trees, other flowering plants and ferns. Madagascar “is absolute nirvana,” says MBG botanist James S. Miller, who has spent decades exploring the island’s flora.

The Ravenala traveler’s tree is widely grown, but native only to Madagascar.CEPHOTO, UWE ARANAS/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Just consider the rarities. Of the eight known species of baobab trees, which raise a fat trunk to a cartoonishly spindly tuft of little branches on top, six are native to Madagascar. Miller considers some 90 percent of the island’s plants as natives unique to the country. “It wrecks you” for botanizing elsewhere, Miller says.

He was rooting for his MBG colleagues Randrianasolo and Birkinshaw in their foray to Madagascar’s Agnalazaha forest. Several months after getting roasted as liars by residents, the two got word that the skeptics had decided to give protection a chance after all.

The Agnalazaha residents wanted to make sure, however, that the Missouri group realized the solemnity of their promise. Randrianasolo had to return to the island for a ceremony of calling the ancestors as witnesses to the new partnership and marking the occasion with the sacrifice of a cow. A pact with generations of deceased residents may be an unusual form of legal involvement, but it carried weight. Randrianasolo bought the cow.

Randrianasolo looked for ways to be helpful. MBG worked on improving the village’s rice yields, and supplied starter batches of vegetable seeds for expanding home gardens. The MBG staff helped the forest residents apply for conservation funds from the Malagasy government. A new tree nursery gave villagers an alternative to cutting timber in the forest. The nursery also meant some jobs for local people, which further improved relationships.

Trying to build trust with people living near southeastern Madagascar’s coast was the first task the Missouri Botanical Garden faced in efforts to conserve the Agnalazaha forest.Courtesy of the staff of the Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis and Madagascar

The MBG staff now works with Malagasy communities to preserve forests at 11 sites dotted in various ecosystems in Madagascar. Says Randrianasolo: “You have to be patient.”

Today, 19 years after his first visit among the mourners, Agnalazaha still stands.

Saving forests is not a simple matter of just meeting basic needs of people living nearby, says political scientist Nadia Rabesahala Horning of Middlebury College in Vermont, who published The Politics of Deforestation in Africa in 2018. Her Ph.D. work, starting in the late 1990s, took her to four remote forests in her native Madagascar. The villagers around each forest followed different rules for harvesting timber, finding places to graze livestock and collecting medicinal plants.

Three of the forests shrank, two of them rapidly, over the decade. One, called Analavelona, however, barely showed any change in the aerial views Horning used to look for fraying forests.

Near Madagascar’s Analavelona sacred forest, taxonomist Armand Randrianasolo (blue cap) joins (from left) Miandry Fagnarena, Rehary, and Tefy Andriamihajarivo to collect a surprising new species in the mango family (green leaves at front of image). The Spondias tefyi, named for Tefy and his efforts to protect the island’s biodiversity, is the first wild relative of the popular hog plum found outside of South America or Asia.Courtesy of the staff of the Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis and Madagascar

The people living around Analavelona revered it as a sacred place where their ancestors dwelled. Living villagers made offerings before entering, and cut only one kind of tree, which they used for coffins.

Since then, Horning’s research in Tanzania and Uganda has convinced her that forest conservation can happen only under very specific conditions, she says. The local community must be able to trust that the government won’t let some commercial interest or a political heavyweight slip through loopholes to exploit a forest that its everyday neighbors can’t touch. And local people must be able to meet their own needs too, including the spiritual ones.

A different kind of essential

Tied with yarn to nearly 3,000 trees in a Maryland forest, tags displayed the names of the people lost on 9/11. The memorial, organized by ecologist Joan Maloof who runs the Old-Growth Forest Network, helped protect a patch of woods where people could go for solace and meditation.Friends of the Forest, Salisbury

Another constellation of old forests, on the other side of the world, sports some less-than-obvious similarities. Ecologist Joan Maloof launched the Old-Growth Forest Network in 2011 to encourage people to save the remaining scraps of U.S. old-growth forests. Her bold idea: to permanently protect one patch of old forest in each of the more than 2,000 counties in the United States where forests can grow.

She calls for strong legal measures, such as conservation easements that prevent logging, but also recognizes the need to convey the emotional power of communing with nature. One of the early green spots she and colleagues campaigned for was not old growth, but it had become one of the few left unlogged where she lived on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

She heard about Buddhist monks in Thailand who had ordained trees as monks because loggers revered the monks, so the trees were protected. A month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, she was inspired to turn the Maryland forest into a place to remember the victims. By putting each victim’s name on a metal tag and tying it to a tree, she and other volunteers created a memorial with close to 3,000 trees. The local planning commission, she suspected, would feel awkward about approving timber cutting from that particular stand. She wasn’t party to their private deliberations, but the forest still stands.

In 1973, high school freshman Doug Hefty wrote more than 80 pages about the value of Saddler’s Woods in Haddon Township, N.J. His typed report, with its handmade cover, played a dramatic role in saving the forest. Saddler’s Woods Conservation Association

As of Earth Day 2021, the network had about 125 forests around the country that should stay forests in perpetuity. Their stories vary widely, but are full of local history and political maneuvering.

 In southern New Jersey, Joshua Saddler, an escaped enslaved man from Maryland, acquired part of a small forest in the mid-1880s and bequeathed it to his wife with the stipulation that it not be logged. His section was logged anyway, and the rest of the original old forest was about to meet the same fate. In 1973, high school student Doug Hefty wrote more than 80 pages on the forest’s value — and delivered it to the developer. In this case, life delivered a genuine Hollywood ending. The developer relented, and scaled back the project, stopping across the street from the woods.

In 1999, however, developers once again eyed the forest, says Janet Goehner-Jacobs, who heads the Saddler’s Woods Conservation Association. It took four years, but now, she and the forests’ other fans have a conservation easement forbidding commercial development or logging, giving the next generation better tools to protect the forest.

Goehner-Jacobs had just moved to the area and fallen in love with that 10-hectare patch of green in the midst of apartment buildings and strip malls. When she first happened upon the forest and found the old-growth section, “I just instinctively knew I was seeing something very different.”

Saddler’s Woods, with a scrap of old-growth forest, has survived in the rush of development in suburban New Jersey thanks to generations of dedicated forest lovers.Saddler’s Woods Conservation Association More