Matt Simon

On a warming planet, it’ll rain more and individual storms will get more intense. This pain will be especially acute in urban areas, which are built on stormwater infrastructure designed to handle the rainfall of yesteryear. Think back to what the builders of the last century wanted: sewers and canals that funneled rainwater as quickly as possible into a river, lake, or ocean, before it had a chance to accumulate. That worked fine, most of the time. But over the intervening years, rare catastrop…

Kristina Dahl, principal climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, read that post yesterday. “I’ve been sitting at my desk trying to think of a better way to describe that, but I can’t,” Dahl says. “It’s just shocking.” “Concerning, worrying, wild—whatever superlative you want to use,” says Kate Marvel, senior scientist at Project Drawdown, a nonprofit that fights climate change. “That’s what it is.” The graph below, created by Hausfather, a researcher at the climate group Berkeley…

But how heat waves are rippling through the ground is much less studied. This proliferation of heat could have major implications for the intricate natural systems that grow our food, process water, and even sequester carbon. At a certain point, warming soils could actually contribute to higher air temperatures, in a gnarly sort of climatic feedback loop. Late last month, García-García published troubling findings in the journal Nature Climate Change about soil heat extremes across Central Europ…

But now, climate change is seriously mucking with hops. Droughts and extreme heat have already reduced yields, as well as the alpha acid content of hops grown in Europe. And new modeling, published last week in Nature Communications, estimates that by the year 2050, Europe’s hop growers will see a further 4 to 18 percent drop in yields and a 20 to 31 percent drop in alpha acid content. “What we are seeing under climate change is a combination of more droughts that will affect the yield of the pl…

This is why scientists are increasingly bugging rainforests with microphones—a burgeoning field known as bioacoustics—and using AI to automatically parse sounds to identify species. Writing today in the journal Nature Communications, researchers describe a proof-of-concept project in the lowland Chocó region of Ecuador that shows the potential power of bioacoustics in conserving forests. “Biodiversity monitoring has always been an expensive and difficult endeavor,” says entomologist and ecologis…

As the Arctic warms up to four times faster than the rest of the planet, species are migrating to higher latitudes, both because the Arctic is becoming more hospitable to them, and because their native habitat is becoming less so. The region is greening, for instance, as shrubs and tree species get a foothold in the new climate. Native fishing communities along the North Slope of Alaska have reported catching chum salmon here and there over the last few decades, but they are now finding more. La…

New modeling suggests that by burning less fossil fuels, the ailing snowpack will get a two-for-one benefit: lower temperatures on the snow’s surface and in the surrounding air. “You will start seeing a reduction of these tiny particles in the air, and they would have pretty immediate effect on the snowpack,” says Pacific Northwest National Laboratory climate scientist Ruby Leung, coauthor of a recent paper describing the modeling in Nature Communications. “We expect the air to be cleaner, and t…

The trouble for scientists is that there are thousands of feet of ice between the surface and the glacial underside they urgently need to study. Two new papers, though, are shining light on this mysterious realm—literally so in the case of a swimming robot called Icefin. Scientists drilled a borehole into the ice with hot water, and lowered Icefin through to take video and other measurements along the grounding line. Meanwhile, another team of researchers has found that the groundwater flowing u…

Five stories off the ground at Colorado State University, a highly unlikely garden grows under a long row of rooftop solar panels. It’s late October at 9 am, when the temperature is 30 degrees Fahrenheit and the wind is cutting. Not long before my arrival, researchers had pulled the last frost-intolerant crops out of the substrate underneath the panels, a total of 600 pounds for the season. In their place, cool-season foods like leafy greens—arugula, lettuce, kale, swiss chard—still grow, shaded…

Boom and bust don’t hit much harder than in the Bering Sea. After reaching historically high numbers, the population of snow crabs there cratered by 90 percent following a heat wave in 2018 and 2019. Some 10 billion disappeared. Water temperatures had risen 3 degrees Celsius, but that probably didn’t kill the crabs by overheating them, as you might assume. “It looks like starvation was likely a key player in the collapse,” says fishery biologist Cody Szuwalski of the National Oceanic and Atmosph…