Oh, its about to get real

That's the basic conclusion from the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). If we want to keep global warming to 1.5 Celsius above per-industrial levels (a goal set by the Paris Agreement in 2016) we will need to cut our emissions in half before 2030 and go carbon neutral by 2050. The report then lays out some of the stark consequences of not doing that such as communities and even some entire nations drowned by rising sea level, food shortages caused by prolonged droughts, and more frequent or intense natural disasters such as tropical storms and fires. Given what little we have so far done to avert disaster, even many optimistic people see those warnings as a fait accompli at this point. It still doesn't have to be. But perhaps more pragmatically, we need to act now to prevent things from getting even worse.

Read the report here: http://www.ipcc.ch/report/sr15/

Going up the Country

The National Park System is one of America's great ideas. They have preserved a significant chunk of our natural history for us and future generations to enjoy. Despite the protections they have, National Parks are not immune from existential changes we are causing to the earth system during the Anthropocene.   This Washington Post article summarizes a recent scientific study that suggests that climate change has had a disprortionate impact on our national parks.  This is partly becauese many of our parks are in the arctic and the western US, two regions that have so far experienced the most dramatic climate changes.

Soil!

Our conversion of landscapes such as forests and wetlands into various forms of domesticated landscapes such as row crops, managed pastures, and cities has been a major source of our greenhouse gas emissions as well as contributing to the ongoing imbalance between carbon sequestration and carbon flow to the atmosphere and oceans. This long article in the New York Times explores the role that soils play in this as well as efforts and ideas for improving carbon storage in our agricultural soils.

https://nyti.ms/2HcQ6d2