Links

https://weather.com/news/news/2018-08-19-india-monsoon-flooding-kerala-displaced?cm_ven=wu_videos
Aug. 20, 2018
Some 800,000 people have been displaced worst flooding in a century in southern India's Kerala state, as authorities rushed to bring drinking water to the most affected areas, officials said. Death tolls of more than 200 to 350 were reported by various news agencies.
Officials have called it the worst flooding in Kerala in a century, with rainfall in some areas well over double that of a typical monsoon season. Rains were finally diminishing in parts of Kerala state Monday morning.
The downpours that started Aug. 8 have triggered floods and landslides and caused homes and bridges to collapse across Kerala, a picturesque state known for its quiet tropical backwaters and beautiful beaches.
In several villages in the suburbs of Chengannur, one of the worst-affected areas, carcasses of dead cattle were seen floating in muddy waters on Sunday as water began receding.


https://www.space.com/41533-abrupt-permafrost-melting-carbon-climate-impact.html
Aug. 18, 2018
Scientists have worried for years that rising temperatures will free carbon trapped in frozen soil in the Arctic, accelerating the pace of climate change — but now they believe abrupt thawing below lakes is even more dangerous.
That's the finding of a new paper published as part of a 10-year NASA collaboration to study how climate change will play out in the icy Arctic region.
"We don't have to wait 200 or 300 years to get these large releases of permafrost carbon," lead study author Katey Walter Anthony, an ecologist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, said in a NASA statement about the research. "Within my lifetime, my children's lifetime, it should be ramping up. It's already happening but it's not happening at a really fast rate right now, but within a few decades, it should peak."
Here's the problem: When permanently frozen dirt melts, the bacteria trapped inside it become active again, munch through whatever organic material is in reach, and produce carbon dioxide and methane, which are both powerful greenhouse gases
But when that happens below thermokarst lakes, the process is even grimmer because the water at the surface speeds up the melting below. The released gases, built with carbon atoms between 2,000 and 43,000 years old, quickly rise up through the lake and into the atmosphere.
"Within decades you can get very deep thaw-holes, meters to tens of meters of vertical thaw," Walter Anthony said in the statement. "So you’re flash thawing the permafrost under these lakes. And we have very easily measured ancient greenhouse gases coming out."


https://insideclimatenews.org/news/21082017/rising-temperature-agriculture-crop-yields-climate-change-impact
Aug. 21, 2017
A sweeping study examining decades of research says that yields of the globe's most important crops—providing two-thirds of the world's calories—will plummet as temperatures rise.
For every degree Celsius that the Earth warms, corn yields will go down an average of 7.4 percent, according to the study, which focused on the effects of rising temperatures and did not directly examine other influences related to climate change.
Wheat yields similarly will drop by 6 percent on average for every degree Celsius that temperatures rise, rice yields by 3.2 percent, and soybean yields by 3.1 percent, according to the study. To put that in perspective, governments worldwide have set a goal of reducing their greenhouse gas emissions enough to keep the global temperature rise to less than 2 degrees Celsius this century. 


https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-global-warming-make-food-less-nutritious/
Myers and his colleagues released the results of a six year study examining the nutritional content of crops exposed to levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) that are expected to exist by mid-century. The conclusions were indeed troubling. They found that in wheat grains, zinc concentrations were down some 9.3 percent and iron concentrations were down by 5.1 percent across the seven different crop sites (in Australia, Japan and the U.S.) used in the study. The researchers also noted reduced protein levels in wheat and rice grains growing in the CO2-rich test environment.
According to Myers, the findings—published in June 2014 in the peer-reviewed journal Nature—are particularly troubling when one considers that some of the two to three billion people around the world who depend on wheat and rice for most of their iron and zinc already might not be getting enough of these essential nutrients. Zinc deficiency, which can exacerbate pneumonia, malaria and other health problems, is already linked to some 800,000 deaths each year among children under five. Meanwhile, iron deficiency is the primary cause of anemia, a condition that contributes to one in five maternal deaths worldwide.
Myers and company aren’t the only ones worried about global warming and nutrient losses. Another recent study by mathematical biologist Irakli Loladze analyzed data from thousands of “free-air CO2 enrichment experiments” on 130 different species of food plants and found that increased CO2 reduced overall mineral (nutrient) content across the board. “People don't need large quantities of the manganese or potassium they get from plants, but they do need some,” comments David Berreby on BigThink.com in response to Loladze’s findings. “And for billions of people, plants are their only source.”
Berreby is also bothered by another of Loladze’s conclusions, that higher levels of CO2 also spur increases in starches and sugars in the same plants that lose mineral content. “In other words, with increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide, the valuable nutrients in these food crops are scarcer, and carbohydrates are more abundant—in effect, the nutrients are ‘diluted’,” he explains. This syncs with research out of the University of California at Davis, which estimates that the overall amount of protein we get from our food plants will drop some three percent in the coming decades given global warming’s expected arc.


http://nautil.us/issue/22/slow/why-your-brain-hates-slowpokes
Slowness rage is not confined to the sidewalk, of course. Slow drivers, slow Internet, slow grocery lines—they all drive us crazy. Even the opening of this article may be going on a little too long for you. So I’ll get to the point. Slow things drive us crazy because the fast pace of society has warped our sense of timing. Things that our great-great-grandparents would have found miraculously efficient now drive us around the bend. Patience is a virtue that’s been vanquished in the Twitter age.
“Why are we impatient? It’s a heritage from our evolution,” says Marc Wittmann, a psychologist at the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg, Germany. Impatience made sure we didn’t die from spending too long on a single unrewarding activity. It gave us the impulse to act.
But that good thing is gone. The fast pace of society has thrown our internal timer out of balance. It creates expectations that can’t be rewarded fast enough—or rewarded at all. When things move more slowly than we expect, our internal timer even plays tricks on us, stretching out the wait, summoning anger out of proportion to the delay.
“The link between time and emotion is a complex one,” says James Moore, a neuroscientist at Goldsmiths, University of London. “A lot is dependent on expectation—if we expect something to take time then we can accept it. Frustration is often a consequence of expectations being violated.”


https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/08/20/donald-trump-trillion-dollar-plus-deficits-fiscal-ruin-column/986236002/
Aug. 20, 2018
Trump trillion-dollar-plus deficits are putting America on a path to fiscal ruin


https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/20/summer-weather-is-getting-stuck-due-to-arctic-warming
Aug. 20, 2018
Summer weather patterns are increasingly likely to stall in Europe, North America and parts of Asia, according to a new climate study that explains why Arctic warming is making heatwaves elsewhere more persistent and dangerous.
Rising temperatures in the Arctic have slowed the circulation of the jet stream and other giant planetary winds, says the paper, which means high and low pressure fronts are getting stuck and weather is less able to moderate itself.
The authors of the research, published in Nature Communications on Monday, warn this could lead to “very extreme extremes”, which occur when abnormally high temperatures linger for an unusually prolonged period, turning sunny days into heat waves, tinder-dry conditions into wildfires, and rains into floods.
Circulation stalling has long been a concern of climate scientists, though most previous studies have looked at winter patterns.


https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/July-2018-Earths-4th-Warmest-July-Record?cm_ven=hp-slot-2
Aug. 20, 2018
All-time record heat assaulted northern Europe, western Africa, portions of southern Asia, and California, helping make July 2018 the planet's fourth-warmest July since record keeping began in 1880, said NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) on Monday. NASA rated July 2018 as the third-warmest July on record, with the only warmer July months coming in 2016 and 2017. Occasional differences in rankings between NASA and NOAA arise mostly due to how they handle data-sparse regions such as the Arctic, wh
The year-to-date period of January – July now ranks as the fourth warmest on record, and it is increasingly likely that the five warmest years on record globally will be 2014 through 2018. If an El Niño develops later this year, as predicted, that will give 2019 a very good chance of joining the pack. Barring a massive volcanic eruption, global temperature seems to be headed in one direction, and it isn't downward.