After four years, numerous awards, and something just shy of 900 blog posts, the multimedia reporting effort that’s been known as Climate Watch is turning a significant page. KQED is combining our efforts with Quest, the station’s more broadly-based science and environmental news and programming effort.

We’ll continue to cover climate-related issues, as evidenced by the recent rollout of Heat and Harvest, a major multimedia project with the combined resources of Climate Watch, Quest and the Center for Investigative Reporting. Through a documentary now airing on public television stations throughout California, radio features on The California Report and an extensive lineup of online features, Heat and Harvest examines some of the ways in which climate change is already challenging farmers in the Golden State.

It’s by no means the first successful collaboration between Quest and Climate Watch. Past efforts have produced some high-profile “props,” including a 2011 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award for our TV segment on rising seas in the Bay Area.

The reorganization will, however, mean suspension of the Climate Watch blog, while we consider options for the most successful web strategy going forward. I’m proud of what we’ve done in this space, with groundbreaking work from our producers, Gretchen Weber and Molly Samuel, engaging, eye-opening posts from our freelance contributors, and unflagging support from our news director, Bruce Koon. I’ll miss doing it. I’ll miss writing and editing the posts and I’ll miss the lively discussions in our comments thread. Okay, most of the lively discussions.

I couldn’t resist going back and seeing what we were writing about when we first launched the blog, in the fall of 2008. Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor, organizing the first in a series of “climate summits.” The newly-elected Barack Obama would make a video appearance at that event and pledge swift, comprehensive federal action on climate change. We’re still waiting. Market analysts were speculating on what the price for a metric ton of carbon would be in California’s nascent cap-and-trade market (we still don’t know but will find out in about a month).

Though it may seem like the climate agenda has moved little in four years, climate change remains one of the critical challenges of our time. That’s becoming more evident with each passing year. Polls indicate that a strong majority of Californians agree, and expect policymakers to attend to both the consequences of a changing climate, as well as continued efforts to stem those consequences. So we’ll continue to monitor and report major developments on the science and policy fronts. Except now, we’ll be doing it with a much larger pool of talent. The KQED Science & Environment team includes a proven stable of writers, video producers and radio reporters, as well as specialists in education, digital production and social media. We’ll still be part of the climate conversation. We hope you will be, too.

The post Climate Watch Joins New KQED Science Unit appeared first on Climate Watch.

The Great American Heat Wave of 2012 arrived later in California than in many parts of the country — and it’s in no hurry to leave.

Having nudged the upper 90s on Sunday, Sacramento closed out the month of September with a record 26 days of 90-plus highs, surpassing the 1974 record of 24 days. The trend is forecast to continue into the first several days of October, with a chance of hitting 100 for the first time since mid-August. Farther north, Sacramento Valley towns like Redding and Red Bluff are suffering similar bake-offs.

Dry heat persisted up and down California, accompanied by red-flag warnings for fire danger along the South Coast. Of course, it’s that time of year, when the sea breeze backs around and “offshore flows” become the dreaded Santa Anas (in the south) and Diablos (in the north), notorious for fanning catastrophic wildfires. Air quality suffers during these periods, even without fires. Air quality regulators placed a Spare-the-Air Alert in effect for Monday in the San Francisco Bay Area.

For a vivid visual review of the world’s extreme weather in 2012, the World Resources Institute constructed a timeline of major events, which currently runs through August and WRI says it plans  to continue updating.

The post Autumn Makes a Sultry Entrance appeared first on Climate Watch.

As the centerpiece of California’s climate strategy, the law known as AB 32 gets all the attention. But a little-known component of the state’s plan to mitigate climate change, Executive Order S-3-05, is even more ambitious. A new report from the independent California Council on Science and Technology (CCST) takes aim at its aggressive greenhouse-gas-reduction goal for 2050, and shows just how difficult it will be to reach it.

Signed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in June 2005, EO S-3-05 calls for the state to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 (a target also written into AB 32 and passed the following year), and to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050 — effectively a 90% per-capita decrease when population growth is factored in. The 2020 goal sounds easy enough — especially if a third of our electricity generation is renewable by then — but existing efforts, including cap-and-trade, still won’t be enough. In other words, the state has got to come up with even more reductions in the next eight years.

What happens when we project all the way out to 2050? A business-as-usual scenario would put our emissions at double the 1990 level. But the new report — coauthored by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Jeffery Greenblatt — found that with existing technologies (that means currently commercially available or in demonstration) and for “reasonable” rates and costs, we could reduce our emissions to 60% below 1990 levels. This equates to about 170 million metric tons in total emissions: a considerable achievement, but still double the 85 million-metric-ton limit established by the 80% goal.

Reducing emissions to 60% below 1990 levels hinges on continued advances in energy efficiency and widespread electrification of all energy sectors, including light-duty vehicles, trucks, buses, trains, buildings, and industrial-process heating, the researchers found. To meet our future electricity needs and still keep emissions down, a variety of energy mixes could work.

A technology-neutral “median case,” for example, posits that we could get there with roughly:

• One-third natural gas
• One-third nuclear
• One-third renewables

Greenblatt says some zero-emissions strategies would also be needed to to keep the state’s power grid in “balance,” like batteries or voluntary reductions in electricity use, known in the industry as “demand response” programs.

That, plus aggressive deployment of biofuels to meet about half of our projected demand for fuel, is the researchers’ best guess for how California could reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 170 million metric tons by 2050. And Greenblatt is fairly confident it’ll work: “It’s feasible if the state aggressively pursues the policies to make that happen,” he said.

[module align=”left” width=”half” type=”pull-quote”]…you’re talking about technologies that don’t yet exist.[/module]

Once you start looking at dropping that last 85 million to hit the 80% mark, however, you’re talking about technologies that don’t yet exist — or that exist only in the most theoretical sense. To reach its goal, Greenblatt said the state must, in essence, address two major challenges: 1) switching to entirely emissions-free load-balancing technologies, eliminating the use of backup natural-gas “peaker” plants; and 2) reducing greenhouse-gas emissions from fuels through advanced technologies like hydrogen fuel, carbon sequestration in biofuel development, or the use of artificial photosynthesis to produce hydrocarbons from sunlight, a cutting-edge technique being tested now at CalTech.

A self-labeled optimist, Greenblatt says this study — and the four other reports in the CCST’s “California’s Energy Future” project, plus two more to come — is a crucial first step in supporting the development of policies and technologies that California will rely on through 2050 and beyond. The CCST already has the ear of the governor’s office, the Air Resources Board, the California Public Utilities Commission, and the California Energy Commission.

“Because of the long lead times, we felt it was really important to highlight these longer-term challenges so that the state can start planning now,” Greenblatt said. “If we can show that something is possible, it’s largely up to will to make it happen.”

The post Reality Check: California’s Ultra-Low-Greenhouse Gas Future appeared first on Climate Watch.

This week, scientists from around the world are meeting in Monterey to discuss what they call the “other” climate change problem: the oceans are becoming more acidic. It happens as oceans absorb the carbon dioxide we add to the air through burning fossil fuels. It can be bad news for oysters, mussels and the marine food web. How bad? Scientists are hoping that ocean conditions off the California coast will help them find out.

At the Hog Island Oyster Company, near Point Reyes, Terry Sawyer orders oysters from hatcheries in Oregon and Washington when they’re small. They grow up in big mesh bags that sit out in Tomales Bay, where they get plump in the cold waters of the Pacific.

But a few years ago, Sawyer started getting calls from those suppliers. They couldn’t fill his orders.

“They would have tens of thousands of gallons of tanks that were absolutely full of larvae. They would have the entire system die or crash,” he says.

The hatcheries were filling their tanks with seawater that was becoming more acidic. Scientists say the oceans are 30% more acidic since the start of the Industrial Revolution. The more acidic the water, the harder it is for animals like oysters to develop their shells.

Sawyer is growing his own oyster larvae now so he’ll have a more predictable supply. But he says there’s no question that climate change is affecting his bottom line.

“We don’t know if we’re going to be able to survive the very real trending that is going on out there,” he says.

It’s trend that could affect the entire food web.

On a rocky point an hour drive north of Point Reyes, a team of scientists from the University of California’s Bodega Marine Lab is gathering. The rocks are covered in tightly packed, purplish mussels – what ecologist Eric Sanford calls the “foundation species” of the California coast.

“One that really defines the whole ecosystem, sort of the way corals define a coral reef,” he says.

Mussels are a key part of the food web. And so are a lot of animals with shells.

“Probably most people like the fact that we have things like whales and salmon off our coast and those organisms are likely to be impacted because their food source will be impacted,” says oceanographer Tessa Hill.

So the big question is: Will animals with shells be able to adapt to a more acidic future – where, in a hundred years, the oceans could be more than twice as acidic?

These California mussels could help answer that.

“They’re facing the most acidic water that you’d see in the ocean today,” says Hill.

[module align=”left” width=”half” type=”pull-quote”]”The trouble is right now, the rate at which the ocean is acidifying is way faster than it ever has before.”[/module]

Acidic water from the deep ocean rises to the surface on the West Coast in the spring and summer, when the wind is blowing. This upwelling makes the waters off California some of the most acidic in the world.

Inside their lab, Hill and Sanford show me jars full of young mussels, almost too small to see. Each jar is from a different part of the West Coast – from Oregon to Santa Barbara. They’re being grown in more acidic water to see if they’re better adapted to handle it, according to Sanford.

“So this is the issue we’re looking at is whether there might be genetic differences among different populations along the coast in their ability to cope with ocean acidification,” he says.

Steve Palumbi is a biology professor at Stanford University who is also working on the project. He looked at the genes of another shelled animal on the West Coast – sea urchins.

“We found they have lucky genes,” he says.

You can think of genes like a set of tools, Palumbi explains.

“If you happen to have bad plumbing, you will have more plumbing tools in your house.”

And there have been lots of plumbing problems on the West Coast – lots of acidic water.

“And so all these populations, urchins anyway, have had to get the tool set to deal with it,” he says.

Palumbi says in some urchins, they found around 100 genes that make them better adapted to more acidic water. That makes them more likely to survive and reproduce.

“This is good news because these organisms have the capacity to deal with more acidification,” he says. “But it’s not good news forever because all it does is give us a little breathing room. The trouble is right now, the rate at which the ocean is acidifying is way faster than it ever has before.”

Organisms will evolve, he says, but probably not fast enough to keep up. In the meantime, Palumbi and other scientists are mapping where the genetically resilient mussels and urchins are on the West Coast, so policymakers can look at protecting them.

The post Oysters May Foreshadow Acidic Oceans’ Effects appeared first on Climate Watch.

By Nicholas Christen and Craig Miller

Autumn is here, so says the calendar. Living on the coast, it might be easy to think that California escaped the heat wave suffered by much of the nation this summer. While that may be true for most of the large coastal population centers, it was a different story for much of the state’s interior farm belt.

Throughout June and July, even Central Valley spots escaped much of the heat felt by the Great Plains, though Cal Expo officials blamed the heat, in part, for tamping down attendance at the state fair. Then things heated up quickly — especially in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys — through August and into September.  Valley towns including Redding, Red Bluff, Sacramento, Merced, Madera, Fresno, and Bakersfield, have been on the order of three-to-five degrees above normal for the duration of August and September.

[module align=”right” width=”half” type=”aside”]

Some of the most extreme deviations in August average temperatures:

• Merced +5.1
• Fresno +4.8
• Bakersfield +4.6
• Sacramento: +4.1
• Madera +3.0

[/module]

Fresno saw 27 days above normal during August and most of those days were at least three degrees above normal, a string one meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Fresno called, “pretty amazing.”

Even Central Valley farmers, who are used to triple-digit days, were taken aback.

“Yeah, this summer has been one of the hottest that I remember,” said Don Cameron, who runs 7,000 acres of crops for the Terranova Ranch, southeast of Fresno. He’s been farming the Valley for 30 years.

“Our tomatoes have taken a little bit of a beating from the 110 degree weather we’ve had, but with the drip irrigation we’re able to keep them a little fresher, a little cooler when it does get hot like that.”

On the day we visited Cameron, the fever seemed to have broken. “Yeah, we’re in the low 90s today,” he snorted. “It’s like — like a spring day.”

“We had just a couple of weeks on end where we were 109, 110, 111 degrees. Just brutal. The nights don’t cool down, it’s hard on the plants, it’s hard on the people.

There has been a plus side to all this.

“I can remember we used to get a lot of real severe frosts during the spring growing season,” recalled Cameron. “I can’t remember the last time we had one that was actually a killing frost during April.” That’s created an opportunity of sorts for growers. “We’ve been able to plant our tomatoes earlier in the year for earlier harvest, which extends the, the season for the cannery.”

The roast continued well into September, bringing with it an unusual late-season streak of 90-plus-degree days in downtown Sacramento. This year could eclipse the September record of 20 days, set back in 1899.

See more on how climate change is challenging California farmers on the documentary, Heat and Harvest. It premieres Friday evening on KQED TV.

The post California’s Farm Belt Didn’t Dodge the Summer Heat Wave appeared first on Climate Watch.

New pests, a shrinking water supply and rising temperatures will alter agriculture in California.

Heat and Harvest, a new series from KQED Science and the Center for Investigative Reporting looks at the multiple climate challenges confronting California farmers. It’s no trivial matter. California’s Central Valley is widely known as “the nation’s salad bowl,” and there’s more than bragging rights at stake. Ag contributes more than $30 billion a year to the state’s economy.

Previously, Climate Watch has focused on efforts in the ag sector to conserve water or lower the carbon footprint. Some farmers are trying new technologies, others are experimenting with renewable energy. But meeting climate challenges on multiple fronts will, for some farmers and ranchers, be a matter of survival.

Here are links to some previous reporting from Climate Watch, from ag’s potential role in California’s emerging cap-and-trade program for carbon emissions, to innovation on the renewable energy front and new conflicts over land use.

Planting the Seeds for Greener Farms
Supporters of sustainable agriculture are looking forward to some “sustenance” of their own, after an eleventh-hour win in Sacramento. The new bills lays out an approach for ensuring that all proceeds from the sale of cap-and-trade permits be used to further reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Among the eligible activities listed in the bill are farming and ranching practices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and sequester carbon.

Satellites Help Save Water on California Farms
Engineers at NASA and CSU Monterey Bay are developing an online tool that can estimate how much water a farm’s field might need. Satellites orbiting the earth take high-resolution pictures which are combined with on-the-ground data from farms.

Making Hay While the Sun Shines: A Flap over Solar Panels in Farm Country
Sun and open land make the San Joaquin Valley ideal for growing crops. But they’re also attracting an increasing number of large-scale solar power developers to the region. And that’s generating debate over whether farming the sun is really farming.

Making Renewable Energy from Farm Waste
California is just a few votes away from changing the rules to allow farmers to connect machines that create bioenergy to the electrical grid, a privilege that has thus far been reserved for farm-generated wind and solar energy.

New Map for Gardeners Won’t Help California’s Green Thumbs
It’s been more than two decades since the U.S. Department of Agriculture updated its Plant Hardiness Zones Map, used by gardeners across the country to determine what will grow in their yards. The new GIS-enabled map unveiled this week is a boost to people who live in places that get a lot of cold weather and may be seeing slightly warmer average winters now. Despite the new level of detail in the map, gardeners in California and the Bay Area in particular, won’t learn much from it.

The post Heat and Harvest: Calif. Farms on a Climate Collision Course appeared first on Climate Watch.

For all we know about climate change and the Earth’s atmosphere, it’s amazing how much more there is to learn. Earlier this month, a team of researchers led by University of Colorado’s Roy “Lee” Mauldin III announced the discovery of a brand new atmospheric compound tied to both climate change and human health.

Above certain parts of the earth, they found, the new compound is at least as prevalent as OH, also called the hydroxyl radical, long thought to be the primary oxidant responsible for turning sulfur dioxide, an industrial pollutant, into sulfuric acid. The new compound, it turns out, can play an equally important role. Sulfuric acid contributes to acid rain and results in the formation of aerosols, airborne particulates associated with a variety of respiratory illnesses in humans and known to seed the formation of clouds.

Mauldin made the discovery by investigating background levels of sulfuric acid in atmospheric samples that were not attributable to OH. He inferred that another compound must be responsible for the effect and was able to isolate it through a series of tests. No one else had ever made the connection before.

[module align=”left” width=”half” type=”pull-quote”]Aerosols are one of the least-understood variables in climate models.[/module]

“As soon as I realized that we were observing a new oxidant, the light clicked on all over the place,” Mauldin said in an interview. “With anything that can produce sulfuric acid, if you can come up with something that occurs on a daily basis, or in this case 24/7, it can affect all sorts of things, including climate and human health.”

In few places is that effect more pronounced than in California. “Aerosols are a major public health problem in the Central Valley,” said Ron Cohen, Director of the Berkeley Atmospheric Sciences Center at the University of California. In fact, they’re worse in the Valley than just about anywhere else in the country — except maybe Los Angeles.

Mauldin believes that the new compound is emitted more heavily by trees than by man-made sources, meaning it may be less important to aerosol formation above the Central Valley than it is above the Finnish Boreal Forest where field research was conducted. But we don’t know that for sure. Nor do we know precisely how to calculate aerosols’ role in climate change.

In fact, aerosols are one of the least-understood variables in climate models, Cohen said. We do know that aerosols contribute to cloud formation, commonly understood to have a cooling effect on the earth. However, we don’t know whether aerosols are changing the height of clouds, which has complex implications for temperature: low clouds tend to have a cooling effect, while high clouds actually trap heat in the atmosphere. Furthermore, some aerosols reflect heat, while others absorb it.

The new compound offers science a new way of charting the formation of aerosols today as well as an important tool for determining what the atmosphere was like before we came along. Both uses are likely to fine-tune our ability to understand and forecast climate change moving forward. As far as what, precisely, it’ll tell us — well, that remains to be seen.

The post New Atmospheric Compound Impacts Climate, Human Health appeared first on Climate Watch.

This post is based on a report produced by Climate Central, a non-profit climate education group.

The 2012 wildfire season isn’t over yet, but already this year is shaping up to be the one of the worst on record in the American West. According to the National Interagency Fire Center, with nearly two months still to go in the fire season, the total area already burned this year is 30% more than in an average year, and fires have consumed more than 8.6 million acres, an area larger than the state of Maryland.

Yet, what defines a “typical” wildfire year in the West is changing. In the past 40 years, rising spring and summer temperatures, along with a shrinking mountain snowpack, have increased the risk of wildfires in most parts of the West.

Studies show that continued climate change is going to make wildfires much more common in the coming decades.

The National Research Council reports that for every degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) of temperature increase, the size of the area burned in the Western U.S. could quadruple. According to the 4^thAssessment Report from the U.N.’s climate science panel, summer temperatures in western North America could increase between 3.6 degrees and 9 degrees by the middle of this century.

Key findings

Climate Central’s analysis [PDF] of 42 years of U.S. Forest Service records for 11 Western states shows that:

The number of large and very large fires on Forest Service land is increasing dramatically.  Compared to the average year in the 1970’s, the past decade saw:

• 7 times more fires greater than 10,000 acres each year
• Nearly 5 times more fires larger than 25,000 acres each year
• Twice as many fires over 1,000 acres each year, with an average of more than 100 per year from 2002 through 2011, compared with fewer than 50 during the 1970’s.

In some states the increase in wildfires is even more dramatic. Since the 1970’s the average number of fires of over 1,000 acres each year has nearly quadrupled in Arizona and Idaho, and has doubled in California, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Utah and Wyoming.

On average, U.S. wildfires burn twice as much land area each year as they did 40 years ago. In the past decade, the average annual burn area on Forest Service land in the West has exceeded two million acres — more than all of Yellowstone National Park.

The burn season is two-and-a-half months longer than 40 years ago. Across the West, the first wildfires of the year are starting earlier and the last fires of the year are starting later, making typical fire years 75 days longer now than they were 40 years ago.

Rising spring and summer temperatures across the West appear to be correlated to the increasing size and numbers of wildfires. Spring and summer temperatures have increased more rapidly across this region than the rest of the country, in recent decades. Since 1970, years with above-average spring and summer temperatures were typically years with the biggest wildfires.

Other factors are believed to be contributing to more severe fires, such as the Forest Service’s 60-year policy of aggressive fire suppression (reversed in the 1990’s) that left more fuel for today’s outbreaks, but as average global temperatures rise, researchers project that the risk of wildfires in America’s West will accelerate.

A version of this post also appears at Climate Central, a content partner of Climate Watch.

The post The New Age of Western Wildfires May Be Here appeared first on Climate Watch.

The City of Oakland is forging a comprehensive Energy and Climate Action Plan aimed at mitigating climate change. Even by California standards; it’s ambitious, calling for a 36% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels by 2020 (statewide emissions decreased 5.3% between 2005 and 2009, the most recent year for which numbers are available). It also lays out the policies and programs needed to make it happen. What the plan doesn’t answer is how the city will cope with the climate change that has already been set in motion.

Enter a study prepared by Oakland’s Pacific Institute for the California Energy Commission, published in July but not widely circulated until this month. It fills in the holes in the city’s approach by advancing “climate adaptation planning,” in which local governments prepare for dealing with climate change on a short-and-long-term basis and across all segments of the population.

[module align=”left” width=”half” type=”pull-quote”]”We’re going to see significant impacts no matter what you do with greenhouse gases.”[/module]

“Our concern was that we’re already down the road a bit on climate change, and we’re going to see significant impacts no matter what you do with greenhouse gases,” said Brian Beveridge, co-director of the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project, which helped prepare the report. “So we were looking at how will people react to climate change over the next fifty years, because we’re definitely going to see it happen to us.”

Not that the city itself is blind to the issue. A chapter of its plan entitled, “Climate Adaption and Increasing Resilience” dedicates five pages out of 81 to the idea that a certain amount of climate change is inevitable and beginning to occur now — and that in addition to avoiding future impacts by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, we’ve got to learn to live with it.

The chapter lays out a nice little suite of looming climate challenges for the city:

“…significantly decreased snowpack in the Sierra Mountains (the source of most of Oakland’s potable water supply); rising Bay and Delta waters; increased fire danger; greater frequency and intensity of heat events; added stress on infrastructure; pricing and quality of life impacts; and ecological impacts.”

The plan offers some potential solutions but leaves the details for another day.

The Pacific Institute teamed up with the Oakland Climate Action Coalition, a 50-member consortium housed at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, to nudge the city along. Its report identifies more than 50 specific strategies for building resilience and adaptability into local communities, organized by climate disaster. A sampling of the (admittedly intimidating) recommendations:

Extreme heat

• Develop early-warning systems for extreme heat events
• Open air-conditioned buildings to the community during extreme heat events
• Install cool pavement
• Install green roofs

Flooding

• Limit development in floodplain
• Preserve or restore wetlands
• Raise existing structures above flood level
• Build levees and seawalls

Wildfires

• Replace flammable vegetation with less-flammable options
• Limit development in fire-prone areas
• Ensure adequate shelters are in place

Rising utility and food costs

• Promote energy and water efficiency
• Develop and support local food systems
• Programs to reduce financial hardship on residents
• Create green economy and workforce

Poor air quality

• Insulate/seal homes
• Create “safe rooms” with HEPA filters
• Develop warning system for air-quality

“We don’t have a very prepared society for these events,” Beveridge said of Oakland. “There are still places in the hills that are very hard to get to with a firetruck. In my neighborhood in the flatlands, our storm system and sanitary sewer system is 100 years old.

“We have not spent the time on infrastructure maintenance to prepare us for what could be coming in the next couple decades.”

An aspect of its plan entitled “Climate Adaption and Increasing Resilience” dedicates five pages out of 81 to the idea that a certain amount of climate change is inevitable and beginning to occur now — and that in addition to avoiding future impacts by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, we’ve got to learn to live with it.

This post has been revised. An earlier version misstated the number of pages that the Oakland plan devotes to adaptation.

The post Filling the Gaps in Oakland’s Climate Plan appeared first on Climate Watch.

NOAA has created a startling animation of this year’s record shrinkage of ice in the Arctic Ocean. The 34-second clip zooms in from a western hemisphere view and presents as a time-lapse, tracking the ice from January 1 to September 14. This is the first time since NOAA started using satellites to monitor the Arctic in 1979, that sea ice area has shrunk to less than 4,000,000 square kilometers. What happens in the polar regions has a profound effect on the world’s climate.

The post Animation: The Arctic’s Record-Breaking Ice Melt appeared first on Climate Watch.