climate change

As the avocado market struggles in California, niche growers on the southern coast are switching to an unexpected crop: coffee. “[T]hey are eyeing machinery that can harvest the beans, which would reduce labor costs, as well as a contraption called a demucilager that mechanically strips coffee berry skin and pulp off the beans, rather than using water to clean them,” says The New York Times.

Marc Sadler, an advisor to the World Bank on agriculture risk and markets, told an Agrimoney conference that global agriculture needs "transformational change" to meet rising demand for food at the same time there is concern about controlling greenhouse gas emissions. Agriculture is a major source of the gases.

With the release of the 2018 White House Budget proposal, environmentalists and public lands advocates are worried over a $1.4 billion (10.9 percent) cut to the Interior Department. The proposal targets federal lands, opens oil drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), and cancels money set aside to bring economic opportunities to Appalachia — often in the form of farming ventures.

An unexpected thaw of Arctic permafrost let water into the famed "doomsday" seed vault 1,000 kilometers from the North Pole, reported Reuters. The water, halted in the entrance hall of the seed repository, "had no impact on millions of seeds of crops including rice, maize, potatoes and wheat that are stored more than 110 metres inside the mountainside," said the news agency.

Unless critical habitat is protected and restored, researchers say three-quarters of California's 31 native trout, steelhead and salmon species "will be extinct in the next 100 years," says the Sacramento Bee. "California’s record-breaking drought that officially ended this winter wreaked havoc on many of the already-struggling fish, which depend on cold water."

Three new studies show that the West is running low on water, and that much of that decline is a result of climate change, says High Country News.

As the climate warms and the world’s oceans take up more carbon dioxide, those waters are becoming increasingly acidic, causing damaging corrosion to the shells of many marine species, including oysters.

With wildflowers blooming as many as 12-20 days ahead of long-term averages, spring has officially sprung early in the West, according to maps kept by the USA-National Phenology Network. “The exceptions are high-elevation Western mountains ... where spring is expected to arrive on time, and the Pacific Northwest and parts of the Pacific coast... where gusts of cold Arctic air have delayed spring,” says High Country News using the network’s data.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson signed an agreement to fight climate change this week during his trip to Alaska for the Arctic Council, a multinational group that includes Russia and Canada. “The Arctic agreement Tillerson signed with foreign ministers from the other seven nations of the council, including Russia, Canada and Norway, made only a passing reference to the Paris pact,” reports Reuters. “It noted ‘entry into force’ of the pact and its implementation and called for global action to reduce greenhouse gas pollution.”

California, New Mexico, New York and Washington State have sued the Interior Department and the Bureau of Land Management in an attempt to stop new coal leases on public lands.

In his first foreign speech since leaving office, former President Obama said agriculture is the second-largest source of greenhouse gases and it is feeling the effect of global warming. "We've already seen shrinking yields and rising food prices," Obama said at the Seeds and Chips conference in Milan, according to the New York Times.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson flies to Alaska today for a meeting of the Arctic Council — a multi-government group that includes Canada, Russia and five other Arctic nations. Under the Obama administration, the U.S. chaired the council for two years and made climate change in the region a central issue.

In a move meant to stem government regulation, the EPA is cutting academic scientists from its scientific review board and replacing them with industry representatives, while the Interior Department prepares for a review of the scientists on its own advisory council.

Some climate skeptics have pointed to a slower rise in global temperature between 1998 and 2012 as evidence that climate change isn't as dramatic as believed or that it has stopped altogether, says The Guardian. But a report out in the journal Nature says that the so-called pause in warming is largely a fact of research groups using data differently — and not a reason to doubt climate change.

The EPA is changing language on its webpage to match the values of the new administration, and the fact that both President Trump and EPA head Scott Pruitt have publicly denied that climate change is manmade.

An epidemic of West Nile virus, spread by mosquitos, that killed 19 people and hospitalized 216 in Dallas in 2012, "might seem like random bad luck," says the New York Times Magazine, the unlikely result of a mild winter, warm spring and the heaviest early rainfall in 10 years. But Robert Haley, director of epidemiology at Texas Southwestern Medical Center, "doesn't think of it as an accident. He considers it a warning."

The U.S. is seeing its warmest period in recorded history. “The latest one-, two-, three-, four- and five year periods — ending in March — rank as the warmest in 122 years of record-keeping for the Lower 48 states, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,” says The Washington Post.

In FERN’s latest story, published with Switchyard Magazine, reporter Robert Kunzig takes us to the upper Mississippi River Delta, where the idea of growing more fruits and vegetables — to ease the burden on California in the climate-change era — is taking root.