New study from world’s leading lemur expert paints grim picture for future of dietary specialists

What are the best ways for U.S. cities to combat climate change? A new study co-authored by an MIT professor indicates it will be easier for cities to reduce emissions coming from residential energy use rather than from local transportation — and this reduction will happen mostly thanks to better building practices, not greater housing density.

The study analyzes how extensively local planning policies could either complement the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan (CPP) of 2015 or compensate for its absence. The CPP is intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. In early 2016, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling halted the measure’s potential enactment; the legal case is unresolved and the Trump administration has announced it intends to unwind the CPP.   

As Earth’s climate continues to warm, the urban heat island effect raises concerns that city-dwellers will suffer more heat stress than their rural counterparts. However, new research suggests that some cities actually experience a cooling effect. 

More than 60 percent of urban areas in India experience a day-time cooling effect, according to the study, which was published in Scientific Reports. The cooling effect has been observed in the past, but this paper is the first to directly identify a cause: lack of moisture and vegetation in non-urban areas surrounding the city.

Thousands of marks on the Antarctic seafloor, caused by icebergs which broke free from glaciers more than ten thousand years ago, show how part of the Antarctic Ice Sheet retreated rapidly at the end of the last ice age as it balanced precariously on sloping ground and became unstable. Today, as the global climate continues to warm, rapid and sustained retreat may be close to happening again, and could trigger runaway ice retreat into the interior of the continent, which in turn would cause sea levels to rise even faster than currently projected.

In the past decades, large areas of forest in Sumatra, Indonesia have been replaced by cash crops like oil palm and rubber plantations. New research, published in the European Geosciences Union journal Biogeosciences, shows that these changes in land use increase temperatures in the region. The added warming could affect plants and animals and make parts of the country more vulnerable to wildfires.

NASA satellites have provided various views of Tropical Storm Saola as it tracks toward Japan in the northwestern Pacific Ocean. The GPM and Suomi NPP satellites found heavy rainfall, towering thunderstorms and a tropical cyclone still being affected by vertical wind shear.

One of the largely unanticipated impacts of a changing climate may be a decline in sunlight's ability to disinfect lakes, rivers, and coastal waters, possibly leading to an increase in waterborne pathogens and the diseases they can cause in humans and wildlife.

When Typhoon Lan made landfall in Japan on Oct. 22, the Global Precipitation Measurement mission core satellite or GPM analyzed the storm and added up the high rainfall that it generated. By Oct. 24, Extra-tropical cyclone Lan moved east into the Bering Sea and generated storm warnings.

The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) was awarded a competive federal grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to develop a forecast system that will predict seasonal and year-to-year changes in ocean temperatures on the Northeast U.S. Shelf. Other institutions involved in this project include Stony Brook University (SBU) and the Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC) in Woods Hole.

Extensive, mature forest cover can mitigate the impact of severe heat waves, droughts and other weather extremes over large regions, according to new NOAA research published online in the journal Nature Communications.