Extreme drought in Argentina is expected to reduce the country's GDP by 3% this year.  Because this decline comes almost entirely in the agricultural sector, significantly lower crop yields are likely to affect global prices for soybeans, corn, wheat, and other foodstuffs.  www.reuters.com/world/americas/historic-drought-argentina-seen-shrinking-gdp-by-3-points-2023-03-10/

Phenology is the study of seasonal or cyclic natural phenomena, such as animal migration or the flowering of plants. The USA National Phenology Network provides a series of historic, real-time, and forecast maps related to a wide variety of plant, animal, and temperature cycles. This one looks at spring leafing anomalies (the darker the red, the earlier plants are leafing out relative to historic norms; the blue areas show delayed leafing).  From www.usanpn.org/data/spring_indices

Although some locations in the U.S. have gotten massive amounts of snow this winter -- 9.7 feet in Buffalo, New York, for example, and nearly 43 feet on Mammoth Mountain in California's Sierra Nevadas -- other traditionally snowy places like Boston and Chicago have received below-average snowfall. https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/02/03/us-snowfall-extremes-map

As this map shows, thus far, the winter has proved warmer than usual in most of Europe, which has allowed natural gas and other energy prices to fall back to more normal levels. But a colder-than-usual winter in parts of Asia is creating natural gas shortages and heating problems in China, in particular.   (Map from www.nytimes.com/2023/01/25/business/china-natural-gas-shortages.html.)

This article from The Washington Post provides a fascinating look at cutting-edge techniques for exploring remote places -- including the use of diving robots and sensors on animals -- as well as the significance of the Denman Glacier in East Antarctica.  www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/01/18/climate-change-glacier-antarctica/

A large high-pressure zone over Greenland is expected to create a phenomenon known as the "Greenland block," so named because it blocks the usual path of the Northern Hemisphere's jet stream, later this month. A Greenland block redirects the jet stream southward, often creating colder (and often wetter) conditions on the East Coast of the U.S.  Most of the Washington, DC area's biggest snowstorms, including the 2009 "Snowpocalypse" storm that dumped about two feet of snow in 24 hours, resulted from a Greenland block. www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2022/11/29/greenland-block-snow-dc-midatlantic/

The world's tropical glaciers -- in Asia, in Africa, and in South America -- are essential sources of water for billions of people. This article looks at the looming disappearance of Africa's glaciers, due not just to warming but to drought and changing rainfall patterns across East Africa: www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2022/kenya-glaciers-africa-climate-change/

Yes, climate change is making some natural disasters worse, but is it also becoming a tidy way of letting governments off the hook for bad planning?  The recent floods in Pakistan are a case in point. An international team of researchers analyzed the flooding in Pakistan and found that rainfall in the southern provinces of Sindh and Balochistan was "about 75% more intense than it would have been had the climate not warmed by 1.2C." But the report also found "The devastating impacts were also driven by the proximity of human settlements, infrastructure (homes, buildings, bridges), and agricultural land to flood plains, inadequate infrastructure, limited ex-ante risk reduction capacity, an outdated river management system, underlying vulnerabilities driven by high poverty rates and socioeconomic factors (e.g. gender, age, income, and education), and ongoing political and economic instability." Although solving climate change will remain out of the purview of any single country, that does not mean governments do not need to address in-country zoning, infrastructure, economic and political issues to mitigate the impacts of climate change. www.worldweatherattribution.org/climate-change-likely-increased-extreme-monsoon-rainfall-flooding-highly-vulnerable-communities-in-pakistan/

NASA instrumentation aboard the International Space Station has pinpointed more than 50 methane super-emitters since it was installed in July, including an oilfield in New Mexico, a waste-processing complex in Iran, and massive, previously unidentified plumes associated with oil and gas facilities in Turkmenistan.  The instrumentation will be in service for a year and will be tracking airborne dust to help scientists model the potential for airborne dust in different parts of the world "to trap or deflect heat from the sun, thus contributing to warming or cooling of the planet."  Identifying methane sources from space, including those in locations that would otherwise be difficult to monitor, was an unexpected side benefit.  www.reuters.com/lifestyle/science/nasa-instrument-detects-dozens-methane-super-emitters-space-2022-10-26/

Fog is a vital characteristic of biomes ranging from temperate rainforests to cloud forests and may even become a source of water commercially harvested for drinking. Yet scientists around the world are finding that fog, particularly along the coasts, seems to be in decline for complex reasons, including warming oceans.  "Fog may be the most difficult meteorological phenomenon to capture, calculate and predict. Unlike temperature, precipitation, humidity or wind, there is no reliable gauge for it. There is not even a practical definition of it. Most will say that fog is a cloud that touches the ground, which sounds simple enough. But fog is movement in three dimensions, dipping and rising, forming and disappearing. Sometimes a thin layer hugs the water below the Golden Gate Bridge, blinding mariners. Sometimes it settles about 200 feet higher, blinding drivers. Sometimes it shrouds the top of the bridge’s towers and the airspace above, blinding pilots. Sometimes it does it all. Which of those things is fog? ... Fog from the ocean is a dependable feature in several places around the globe, mostly on the west coasts of major continents. Villages in places like Peru and Chile, sometimes with almost no rain throughout the year, have for centuries sustained themselves largely on fog water. ... Using observational data at airports in the coastal redwood region — from central California to its northern border, including the Bay Area — they found that the frequency of fog, measured by fog hours per day, had dropped 33 percent since the middle of the 20th century." www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/14/climate/san-francisco-fog.html

Farmers in the Southwestern U.S. are ripping out orchards, switching to less water-intensive crops, and renting out their land to try to save water and raise money in the face of an extended drought. This map compares vegetation stress in August 2022 with the average August vegetation stress from 1984 to 2020: green is more healthy, red is more stressed.  (Map from  www.wsj.com/articles/drought-in-u-s-west-leads-farmers-to-look-elsewhere-for-revenue-11664535602.)

Using data from a recent study published in Nature, this map from VisualCapitalist shows country-by-country population vulnerability to 1-in-100-year coastal and inland flooding events: www.visualcapitalist.com/countries-highest-flood-risk/

Africa, which produces about 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions, is expected to be hard hit by climate change. This map, from Statista, shows country-by-country assessments of Africa's anticipated resilience to climate change, based on a combination of forecasts vis-a-vis climate impact, local livelihoods, and governmental capacity to respond. www.statista.com/chart/28136/index-scores-for-climate-resilience-of-african-countries/

Americans often confuse the terms "monsoon" and "typhoon."  A monsoon is an annual rainy season; it is usually critical for life in the region.  A typhoon is a wind storm, like a hurricane, in the Pacific Ocean. The extreme flooding in the news in Pakistan is being caused by monsoon rains. Agriculture would be all but impossible in Pakistan without monsoon rains, but, unfortunately, this year's arrived earlier than normal and are falling more heavily than normal.  As of the last official U.N. count, nearly half a million homes in Pakistan have been damaged by the recent flooding and more than 1,000 people have died. This map, from the U.N., shows the damage is concentrated along the lower reaches of the Indus River. By the way, despite was you might read elsewhere, Pakistan cannot experience a typhoon: hurricane-like wind storms in the Indian Ocean are cyclones.  (Map from reliefweb.int/report/pakistan/pakistan-2022-monsoon-floods-situation-report-no-03-26-august-2022.)

This has been China's hottest, driest summer since record keeping began 61 years ago, and the impact on the Yangtze River has been severe, with tributaries dried up and water flow in the main branch running 50% below normal. The Yangtze is the longest river in the world that runs through only one country, and five of China's megacities -- cities with a population of at least 10 million -- are in the Yangtze River basin.  The Yangtze is not only a key source of water for drinking and irrigation, it is also a major source of hydroelectric power. In Sichuan Province, which gets 80% of its electricity from hydropower, factories have been shut recently to save power for home air conditioning. The next few days may also determine the impact on China's main rice crop. www.euronews.com/2022/08/21/china-declares-first-ever-drought-emergency-amid-intense-heatwave

The geologic record shows animals are not the only things that migrate: forests move hundreds of miles, back and forth, in response to changing climate patterns. Recent research, based on satellite imagery and field work, finds that white spruce are now germinating and fully establishing themselves north of Alaska's Brooks Range, which had previously been the biogeographic divide between tundra, to the north, and boreal forest, to the south. This map, from Quartz, shows the newly documented spruce in Alaska's northern tundra. (Map from  qz.com/spruce-trees-have-arrived-in-the-arctic-tundra-a-centur-1849406537.)

California's Central Valley is one of the world's most productive agricultural regions. But it is also periodically, at least measured in geologic time, a long, thin lake. Massive flooding inundates the Central Valley when moisture-rich atmospheric rivers, like the Pineapple Express, stall over California, dumping rain and melting snow in the Sierras. Recent research shows this happens, on average, every 100-200 years. Because this happened most recently between Dec. 1861 and Jan. 1862, scientists are increasingly concerned that the region is ripe for a megaflood event. www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/12/megaflood-california-flood-rain-climate/

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), this year high-tide or "sunny day" flooding -- when water floods streets and bubbles up through storm drains without storm activity -- on the East Coast of the U.S. is expected to show an increase of more than 150% since 2000. NOAA's calculations are based on data from a network of water-level stations along the U.S. coasts and Great Lakes. This interactive mapping site shows past, present, and anticipated 2050 sunny day flooding levels. (In Washington, DC, for example, the average number of high-tide flooding events in 2000 was three; in 2021, it was five, and by 2050, it is forecast to be 55-85.) tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/HighTideFlooding_AnnualOutlook.html

The ocean's fish are on the move in response to climate change. What happens when "your" fish move to someone else's territorial waters? This article from The Independent (UK) looks at new research about fish movement and the impact these movements may have on international fishing agreements. www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/fish-stocks-climate-crisis-disputes-b1996157.html

Europe's record-shattering heat has been in the news, but "Qatar is heating faster than almost anywhere else on the planet, the consequence of being a peninsula surrounded by overheating seas in one of the hottest corners of the world." This article from Geographical (UK) looks at what climate change means for Qatar and how the country is responding: geographical.co.uk/climate-change/climate-and-qatar?

This article from The Wall Street Journal considers what happens when climate change meets the bond market, which in the U.S. alone currently amounts to $4 trillion in municipal bonds plus another $12 trillion in mortgage-backed bonds.

"For centuries, bond investing has boiled down to forecasting two things: which way interest rates are going to move and how likely a borrower is to repay its debts. A handful of startups are betting that to predict repayments in the future, bond analysts will need better data on something they’ve long overlooked—climate risk. The new firms are competing to design algorithms that can predict the likelihood of natural disasters hitting specific towns, industrial parks, even individual buildings, and how much damage they could do. That could become more relevant if wildfires, floods, storms and drought strike more frequently and with greater severity, creating potential new losses for holders of municipal, corporate and mortgage-backed debt. ... 'Eventually this chicken is going to come home to roost,' says the firm’s [risQ's] 34-year-old Chief Executive Evan Kodra.... Paradise, Calif., which was ravaged by the 2018 Camp Fire, disclosed in a March regulatory filing that one of its agencies may default on a $4.8 million bond next year. The town received $219 million from a settlement in 2020 but said it plans to use those funds to rebuild infrastructure instead. ... Over and over, risQ’s model showed that bond markets weren’t discriminating between municipalities with very different climate risk. A school district near California’s wine country has five times the wildfire property-damage risk of a school district a few hours north of Sacramento, for example, but their bonds trade at identical yields, according to risQ research." 
www.wsj.com/articles/high-tech-weathermen-forecast-climate-risks-for-bond-markets-11657461236

How much more are you, personally, willing to pay in higher food prices to tackle climate change? That is the essence of the question farmers, governments, and agribusiness are wrangling with in trying to figure out who should bear the costs of changes to farming practices that might rein in greenhouse gas emissions. www.nytimes.com/2022/07/09/business/farmers-climate-change.html

Climate Central is a US-based nonprofit using science, big data, and proprietary machine-learning mapping to identify coastal areas likely to be underwater or subject to frequent flooding by 2050. According to Climate Central's interactive map, hard-hit areas in Ireland are likely to be Dublin's waterfront and sections of southwestern Ireland, including Shannon's airport and parts of Limerick and County Clare. coastal.climatecentral.org/

Roughly 70% of Zimbabwe's population depends on agriculture for their livelihoods. Persistent droughts have already forced tens of thousands from their homes to rainier areas within the country, creating new domestic competition for water resources. By 2050, the World Bank expects climate change will produce 86 million internal migrants in Sub-Saharan Africa alone. This article from MIT Technology  Review looks at Zimbabwe as a case study in climate migration: www.technologyreview.com/2021/12/17/1041315/climate-migration-africa-zimbabwe/

Conservationists are trying to safeguard the region of the Arctic Ocean that will be the most likely to persist as frozen ice according to climate models. This Last Ice Area, as it is being called, stretches from northwestern Greenland into the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and may serve as a refuge for organisms that depend on sea ice, from polar bears to fish and crustaceans to microbes. www.sciencenews.org/article/arctic-last-ice-area-climate-change