global warming

Starting this summer, the state of California will pay farmers to return nutrients to their soil that were lost to monocultures and tillage. The first of its kind in the country, California’s Healthy Soils Initiative will give growers grants to add “compost on rangelands or [seed] fields between harvests with so-called cover crops such as grasses and mustards, which add organic matter to the soil,” says The New York Times.

Seven out of 10 registered voters think the United States should stay committed to the Paris Climate Agreement, says a survey by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. What’s more, nearly half of Trump voters say the U.S. should participate.

During the last day of the G-7 summit in Italy, President Trump tweeted that he’ll decide later this week whether the U.S. will stay in the Paris Agreement, says the Los Angeles Times. The agreement, signed by almost 200 countries, including the U.S. under President Obama, calls for lowering greenhouse-gas emissions. It's widely supported by the other G-7 countries: Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Canada and Japan.

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 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.

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 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.

Conservatives intent on reversing the Obama administration’s climate-change legacy are angry that EPA chief Scott Pruitt hasn’t gone further. They’d like to see him try to reverse the “endangerment finding” that provides the legal framework for the Clean Power Plan and other climate-change policies.

The Trump administration’s proposed budget would cancel four NASA climate science missions, which would have measured the flow of carbon dioxide and tracked long-term weather patterns. “Long before President Trump was elected, climate researchers have warned that the nation’s climate monitoring capabilities — which include satellites as well as air- and surface-based instruments — were less than adequate and faced data collection gaps and other uncertainties,” reports The New York Times.

Eight of the 12 months of 2016 were the warmest since modern recordkeeping began in 1880, helping to make 2016 the warmest year globally — the third record-setting year in a row, said NASA. "We don't expect record years every year but the ongoing long-term warming trend is clear," said Gavin Schmidt, direct of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Cattle ranching and rice farming are the most plausible sources of rising methane gas emissions, says a new report led by the French Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement (LSCE). The researchers “reported that methane concentrations in the air began to surge around 2007 and grew precipitously in 2014 and 2015,” says Reuters.

Donald Trump now says he has an “open mind” about the Paris Agreement, an international deal to curb greenhouse-gas emissions that was signed by more than 190 countries, including the U.S. During his presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly pledged to cancel U.S. involvement in the agreement, calling climate change a hoax.

NASA's top climate scientist says the globe is warming at a faster pace than seen anytime in the past millennium, so it is "very unlikely" the world can contain the rise in temperatures to the target set in the 2015 Paris climate accord, reported the The Guardian. So far this year, global temperatures are 1.38 degrees C above the levels experienced in the 19th century, "perilously close to the 1.5 degrees C" limit in the accord.

Although 2016 is likely to be the warmest year since global weather record keeping began, 2017 is likely to be a bit cooler with the demise of the El Niño weather pattern, scientists told Reuters. "Next year is probably going to be cooler than 2016," said Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia in Britain.

Last month was the warmest July in 136 years of record keeping, and puts 2016 on track to be the warmest year on record, says NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. And the NASA institute says that, because seasonal temperatures are highest in July, the peak of summer, "it means that July also was warmer than any other month on record."

Researchers say the biosphere, which includes the plants, animals and organisms on land around the world, has become a "net source" of greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide, reports the Washington Post, citing a study in the journal Nature.

Atmospheric physicists at the University of Toronto say global warming will increase water evaporation from the oceans but will not increase the number of storms per year.

Milk production at the average U.S. dairy farm could fall by as much as 1.4 percent due to the addition heat stress on dairy cows from global warming in 2030 when temperatures could be 2 degrees Fahrenheit higher, says an Agriculture Department study.