Learning practices and knowledge from Native Americans can help support nature, farming and more

Native Americans have worked with nature to support themselves and the land for centuries. "These time-honored practices work with the natural world’s rhythms," reports Samuel Gilbert of The Washington Post. "Some might even hold the key to a more resilient future." Below are five of Gilbert's indigenous practices that can help humans tend to Mother Nature while caring for their communities.

Zuni waffle gardens look like an 'earthen waffle.'
(Photo by Curtis Quam via Civil Eats)

Zuni waffle gardens are made with rows of sunken squares "surrounded by adobe walls that catch and hold water like pools of syrup in a massive earthen waffle," Gilbert writes. "The sustainable design protects crops from wind, reduces erosion and conserves water."

Controlled or "cultural burns" were used by Indigenous people "to improve soil quality, spur the growth of particular plants," Gilbert adds. "Prescribed burning has returned as state and federal agencies recognize the importance of fire in managing forests."

The use of acequias, which are ancient irrigation systems dating back to the 1600s. "The name can refer to both the gravity-fed ditches filled with water and the farmers who collectively manage water," Gilbert explains. "The earthen ditches mimic seasonal streams and expand riparian habitats for numerous native species."

Learn from dryland farmers. "The Hopi nation in Arizona receives an average of 10 inches of rain per year — a third of what crop scientists say is necessary to grow corn successfully," Gilbert adds. "Yet Hopi farmers have been cultivating corn and other traditional crops without irrigation for millennia, relying on traditional ecological knowledge rooted in life in the high desert."

Some seeds are 'arid-adapted.'
(Adobe Stock photo)

Find and cherish diverse, resilient seeds. Gilbert writes, "Aaron Lowden, a seed keeper and traditional farmer from the Acoma Pueblo, a village west of Albuquerque, has successfully returned dozens of varieties of traditional arid-adapted seeds such as Acoma blue corn, Acoma pumpkin, Acoma melon and other crops to his pueblo."

To read Gilbert's additional suggestions, which include clam gardens and jaw-dropping indigenous architecture, click here.

Florida lawmakers work to ban local governments from implementing temperature protections for outdoor workers

Summer temps in Florida are regularly in the 90s.
(Photo by Xavier Coiffic, Unsplash)

Some Florida lawmakers are working to pass a bill that removes temperature protection regulations for employees. That same bill also would ban local "living wage" ordinances, which create higher minimum wage standards than the state requirement. "A measure that will ban local governments from passing heat-protection ordinances inspired strong emotions from the public . . . ," reports Mitch Perry for the Florida Phoenix. "The bill also eliminates living wage ordinances that require companies that receive government contracts to pay their employees more than the state's minimum wage (currently $12 an hour)."

This past fall, the Miami-Dade County Commission had planned a vote on a local ordinance that "would protect outdoor workers in the agriculture and construction industries, which, if passed, would be the first law of its kind in the South," Perry adds. "That proposal was introduced after at least two farmworkers died from excessive heat in South Florida earlier last year."

The Florida chapter of Associated Builders and Contractors pushed back against the local heat protection ordinance, saying regulation "inconsistencies" could cause more accidents. Meanwhile, local businesses "lined up behind the provision that would prohibit cities and counties from creating 'livable wage' ordinances for their contractors and subcontractors," Perry explains. "[These] ordinances are now in effect in 11 local governments in the state to combat higher living costs."

North Miami-Dade County Democratic Rep. Dotie Joseph "blasted the proposal, saying that her GOP colleagues were being negligent in taking away Miami-Dade's or any other local government's ability to protect outdoor workers," Perry reports. Joseph told reporters, "When local governments try to do something about it so that it doesn't happen again, here we show up at the state level and say, 'no, we don't mind a couple of more people dying.' That's basically what we're saying, functionally. So we're okay with workers dying."

California, Arizona and Nevada will take less water from the Colorado in return for at least $1 billion in federal funds

Lake Mead (Photo by Matthew Reamer, The New York Times)

"The Biden administration has negotiated a hard-fought agreement among California, Arizona and Nevada to take less water from the drought-strained Colorado River," reports Christopher Flavelle of The New York Times, noting that the deal "reduces, for now, the risk of the river running dry below the Hoover Dam, which would jeopardize the water supply for Phoenix, Los Angeles and some of America’s most productive agricultural land."

The states along river, also vital source of hydroelectric power, reached an agreement with the administration Monday "to conserve an unprecedented amount of their water supply in exchange for about $1 billion in federal funding, according to people familiar with the situation," reports Joshua Partlow of The Washington Post, who reported the outlines of the deal last week. The money would go to states, cities and Native Amerian tribes.

"California, Arizona, and Nevada have agreed to voluntarily conserve 3 million acre-feet of water over the next three years, which amounts to 13 percent of these states’ total allocation from the river," Patrlow reports. "The Biden administration has committed to compensating the states for three quarters of the water savings — or 2.3 million acre-feet — which would amount to at least $1 to $1.2 billion in federal funds, the people familiar with the talks said. The money from the Inflation Reduction Act would pay farmers and others who voluntarily forego their supplies."

Flavelle reports, "The agreement struck over the weekend runs only through the end of 2026, and still needs to be formally adopted by the federal government. At that point, all seven states that rely on the river — which include Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — could face a deeper reckoning, as its decline is likely to continue."

Wheat farmers in Kansas, current hotspot for drought in U.S., are killing their crops and filing crop-insurance claims

Drought Monitor maps from the University of Nebraska are available here.

Wheat farmers in Kansas, the main source of U.S. grain for bread, are "abandoning their crops" because of "severe drought and damaging cold," reports Tom Polansek of Reuters. "They are intentionally spraying wheat fields with crop-killing chemicals and claiming insurance payouts more than normal, betting the grain is not worth harvesting. . . . Other growers are turning over dismal-looking fields to cattle for grazing."

The Department of Agriculture said May 12 that U.S. winter-wheat farmers were planning to abandon 33% of their planted acres, the most since World War I. The USDA estimate for Kansas abandonmemt was only 19%, "up from 10% last year and 4% in 2021," Reuters reports, "but farmers, grain traders and representatives of major food companies who traversed the state on an annual crop tour last week warn of an even greater percentage of unharvested acres. Crop conditions point toward an outcome similar to 1989, when farmers did not harvest 28% of the wheat they planted, said Justin Gilpin, chief executive of the Kansas Wheat Commission.

"Parts of Oklahoma are suffering too. In six northern counties, an estimated 65% to 70% of the crop will not be harvested, said Mike Schulte, executive director of the Oklahoma Wheat Commission. While farmers get some financial protection from insurance, local businesses are at risk when acres are abandoned, as fewer crews of harvesters come through the region, where they would normally spend money at diners and hotels, Schulte said."

Growers unconvinced that carbon-capture farming can be profitable; agribusiness execs remain focused on investment

Soil can retain carbon for years if left undisturbed. (Photo by
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds, Agence France-Presse via Getty Images)

Fact: Undisturbed soil can safely retain converted carbon for years. But farmers are skeptical that it is a profitable use of farmland, reports Patrick Thomas of The Wall Street Journal: "Agriculture companies are investing millions of dollars to develop farming programs designed to capture more carbon dioxide in fields, as a possible solution to mitigate climate change. "The challenge: convincing farmers that it is worth their time, the costs of new farming practices and potentially losing out on some of their harvest in the process."

Thomas cites Iowa corn farmer Chris Edgington, chairman and a former president of the National Corn Growers Association, who "said he has looked at various carbon programs over the past year, calculating the risk of reduced crops as he adjusts the way he manages his crops and the potential compensation for the carbon his fields could capture. So far, he said, he hasn’t signed up." Edgington told Thomas, "At the current economics, it will be a real challenge to grow."

Carbon-capturing crops use photosynthesis to push carbon back into the soil via their roots after harvest. "The agriculture industry, which has come under increased environmental scrutiny in recent years, has said that paying farmers to maximize those natural processes can help make them part of a potential solution. Carbon programs also give companies a potential new revenue stream, as they project farm-generated carbon offsets will draw demand from food manufacturers, airlines and tech companies seeking to offset their own carbon emissions."

So far, farmer participation has not matched investor enthusiasm: "Less than 5% of the more than 1,300 U.S. farmers surveyed by McKinsey Consulting in 2022 said they participated in a carbon program, and more than 50% of farmers said an unclear return on investment was one of their top reasons for not participating," Thomas writes. "Agriculture executives said their farmer sign-ups are on track or exceeding expectations.  . . . Corteva officials said the seed supplier’s program is on track and that demand for carbon credits is expected to rise along with the price farmers are paid."

Thomas reports, "Farmers generally are paid $15 to $20 per ton of carbon sequestered under agriculture companies’ current programs, Bank of Montreal senior analyst Joel Jackson said. He estimated that farmers need to earn more than $50 a ton to make carbon programs economically viable for their operations."

Fast-rising sea slowly erasing coastal Virginia communities

Most of Hog Island has eroded into the Atlantic
Ocean. (Photo map by The Washington Post)

In 1892, the town of Broadwater, on Virginia's Hog Island, was a bustling community with hunting and fishing clubs, families and plenty of oysters. By the early 1900s, the effects of erosion could be seen along the coastline of the southern Delmarva Peninsula, and now "The remains of Broadwater have been lost to the Atlantic Ocean," and the town residents moved to is being threatened by rising sea level, report Chris Mooney, Zoeann Murphy and Simon Ducroquet of The Washington Post.

Buddy Bell, born on Hog Island, told the writers, "I was the next-to-last kid born on there. At one time the island was two miles wide, and now you can throw a shell across it." His family, like many on the island, barged their homes to Oyster, Va., and started over.

Now Oyster is "threatened by a fast-rising ocean, as is much of the U.S. East Coast," they write. "The menace today is different: human-caused climate change. But for some in Oyster, the question of the past echoes today: stay or go?"

Global warming is expanding the ocean, and it's impossible to know how high it will rise. Tide gauges have measured sea levels since 1927, and readings in places like nearby Hampton Roads have been grim. The Post reports, "Seas there rose by more than six millimeters annually over the past 30 years, compared with four millimeters per year during the three decades before."

Post map shows hotspot is sea-level rise.

Barrier islands change for many reasons, but Virginia's are changing at an accelerated rate. "Just 250 miles off Virginia, one of the world’s most dramatic sea-level-rise hot spots has emerged, revealed by satellite measurements that began three decades ago," the Post reports. "Signaling a shift in the Gulf Stream, a massive current that carries heat northward, it’s the most visible sign of a rapidly changing ocean." Kris Karnauskas, a sea-level-rise expert at the University of Colorado, told the writers, “That hot spot just happens to be the loudest symptom of something large-scale and grand going on."

"Oyster now sits near this emerging sea-level-rise hot spot," the reporters write, "and so does part of the legacy of life on Hog Island." The Virginia Coast Reserve Program for the Nature Conservancy, which owns much of the land around Oyster, is hoping to help the community develop a global warming relocation plan.

63% of U.S. acres in drought, up 20 points since Labor Day; shipping on St. Lawrence River has become compromised

Drought Monitor map (lines delineate dominant impacts; S: short-term impacts, typically less than six months (on farms and grasslands); L: longer-term impacts (on hydrology, ecology); SL: short- and long-term impacts)

"More than six of every 10 acres in the continental United States is in drought, with arid conditions stretching from the Appalachians to the Pacific Coast," Chuck Abbott reports for Successful Farming, citing the weekly Drought Monitor of the University of Nebraska's Drought Mitigation Center, produced in partnership with USDA and NOAA.

The extent of drought has increased 20 percent since Labor Day, to 63%, Abbott notes. “The extent of dry conditions is on par with 2012, as drought expanded this week across more than half of the U.S. states, particularly in the Midwest and Southeast,” the center said on social media.

Abbott reports, "The growing season is over for most field crops, but drought affects pasture conditions for livestock as well as the winter wheat crop, which accounts for the lion’s share of U.S. wheat production. A dry winter would leave 2023 crops short of moisture as the new season begins. Low water has hindered barge traffic on the Mississippi River and grain exports from the Gulf of Mexico. Water levels in the St. Lawrence River, another major shipping conduit, have fallen to 10-year lows near Montreal, reported Bloomberg. An official with an international control board for the river said ships have had to lighten their loads to cope with the low water. At least one shipping company raised its rates to carry cargo to and from Montreal."

Mississippi River could stay low this winter, as NOAA predicts continued dry conditions for much of its watershed

NOAA drought outlook through January

This winter, drier-than-normal weather is expected to persist across the southern U.S. and Gulf Coast, Karl Plume reports for Reuters, citing a report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Climate Prediction Center. Those dry conditions should keep water levels low on the Mississippi River, where shipping traffic to and from the Gulf Coast has been stalled or even stopped by low water. 

The dry weather is credited to an expected return of La Niña, a climate phenomenon that alters weather patterns, for the third consecutive winter, the NOAA report says. Drought spans 59% of the country and dry conditions are expected to continue or worsen in much of the West and Great Plains. That's bad news for the southern Plains farm belt "where farmers are struggling to plant their winter wheat crop due to excessively dry soils," Plume writes. Parts of California, the Southwest and southern Rockies could also see drier-than-average conditions, and drought is forecast to expand in the Southeast.

However, above-average precipitation is expected in the Midwest and Ohio River valley, which could eventually could provide relief to the Mississippi later in the winter. Additionally, the NOAA forecasts that the Pacific Northwest and northern Rockies should get wetter-than-average conditions. 

Quick hits: New 'Battery Belt' jobs, declining snowmelt, spooky rural tales, dams that are 'drowning machines' . . .

Santa Claus, Ind., has put up a roadblock for a proposed plant that would make diesel fuel from Illinois Basin coal, reports Rebecca Thiele for Indiana Public Media.

The new "Battery Belt" brings jobs to smaller cities, Joann Mueller reports for Axios.

As snowmelt becomes uncertain, grit and tradition prevail in the Pacific Northwest, Ruth Fremson and Kirk Johnson report for The New York Times.

Low-head dams, called "drowning machines," claim lives across Kentucky and the U.S., Sarah Hume reports for the Louisville Courier Journal. 

Liz Carey and Adam B. Giorgi write up rural America's spookiest stories for the Daily Yonder.

Longer, hotter summers are 'creating inhospitable conditions and endangering lives,' says The Washington Post

Washington Post map shows temperature changes in the nation's four major climate zones.

"Though the summer season of 2022 is young, parts of the nation already have experienced punishingly high temperatures, extreme drought, wildfires, severe storms, flooding or some combination. Projections from federal agencies suggest more abnormally hot weather, an expansion of drought and well above average wildfire and hurricane activity in the months ahead," The Washington Post reports. "Summer has always been a turbulent season, a time of checking weather forecasts and watching the skies. And despite the major shifts that have taken place, many people still relish the season. Vacationers still flock to places that now face some degree of wildfire or flood risk. But climate change is increasingly pushing summer to extremes, creating inhospitable conditions and endangering lives."

The phenomenon is driven by climate change and by urban growth, which increases asphalt and reduces greenery; cities absorb and retain more heat. But the hotter summers are "a clear change from previous generations. The average summer temperature in the past five years has been 1.7 degrees (0.94 Celsius) warmer than it was from 1971 through 2000, according to a Washington Post analysis of data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration., the Post reports. "But some parts of the country have been much harder hit, with the West showing a 2.7 degrees (1.5 Celsius) increase."

Heat waves are becoming more more frequent and intense, and nighttime temps are warming faster than daytime temps in most parts of the country; hotter nights make it difficult for people—and livestock—to cool down after a hot day, the Post reports. Meanwhile, high-heat days are happening at least a week earlier on average compared to fifty years ago. The heat is lengthening wildfire season out West and causing a historic drought. In the East, the hotter temperatures help cause heavy rains and worse flooding. It's straining both the electrical grid and hospital systems that serve the vulnerable.

Drought makes some towns slow or halt development

Oakley, Utah, a community of 1,470
near Salt Lake City in Summit County
(Wikipedia map)

The nation's five fastest-growing states are all in the Mountain West or Southwest, and all are facing severe drought. That drought has prompted many Western communities to halt development. In Oakley, Utah, for example, the drought has "depleted the natural springs that supply water to the community. During each of the past several summers, local leaders worried that quenching any major fire might empty the city’s water tanks," Alex Brown reports for Stateline. Though the city issued water-use restrictions this spring, constituents complained that the city continued issuing building permits, since new construction means more households using water, including newly-laid sod that would need to be watered.

"A rainy autumn has helped replenish Oakley’s water, and the city plans to drill a new well later this year. That should allow the city to double its water capacity and rescind the building moratorium," Brown reports. "But even as Oakley’s fortunes improve, communities throughout the West are facing difficult questions about water scarcity and what it means for future growth—especially because climate change is expected to make such droughts more frequent and intense."

As the nation's climate warmed over the last 30 years, most of the West got drier and most of the East got rainier

Change in annual average precipitation, in inches, over the past 30 years compared to 20th century overall
(New York Times map; click on the image to enlarge it)

Over the past three decades, the U.S. has seen increasingly extreme weather. In the East, that tends to come in the form of flooding and storms; in the West, droughts and wildfires. 

"The map above, created using data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, shows the eastern half of the country has gotten more rain, on average, over the last 30 years than it did during the 20th century, while precipitation has decreased in the West," Aatish Bhatia and Nadja Popovich report for The New York Times. "Thirty-year averages are often used by scientists to glean big-picture climate trends from temperature and precipitation data that varies substantially year to year."

"It’s not yet clear whether these changes in precipitation are a permanent feature of our warming climate, or whether they reflect long-term weather variability," the Times reports. "But they are largely consistent with predictions from climate models, which expect to see more precipitation overall as the world warms, with big regional differences. Broadly: Wet places get wetter and dry places get drier."

That shows on the map. The boundary between drier and wetter in the Southern Great Plains lies roughly along the 100th meridian of longitude, the traditional boundary between dry-land farming and more typical agriculture.

Water scarcity increasing in the Eastern United States

Wall Street Journal map and charts based on U.S. Geological Survey data. Click on the map to enlarge it.

"Increasing competition for water is playing out across the Eastern U.S., a region more commonly associated with floods and hurricanes and one that was mostly a stranger, until recently, to the type of bitter interstate water dispute long seen in the West," Jesse Newman reports for The Wall Street Journal. "Eastern farmers’ rising thirst for water, together with urban growth and climate change, now is taxing water supplies and fueling legal fights that pit states against each other. The shift has exposed the region to changes in water supply occurring globally as swelling populations, surging industrial demand and warmer temperatures turn a resource seen as a natural right into a contested one."

"One striking marker of expanding stress," Newman wrotes, is the boundary between water-rich and water-poor areas. Geologist John Wesley Powell set it more than a century ago on the 100th meridian, which is the north-south border of Texas and Oklahoma. "According to a team of scientists, including those at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, the boundary has shifted about 140 miles eastward since 1979 because of warmer temperatures or reduced rainfall. The scientists predict the West’s drier climate will continue to push eastward and pressure water supplies for farms and cities alike."

The effects can be seen all over the East: "Burgeoning coastal populations have lowered water tables and dried up streams in Long Island," Newman reports. "Near Tampa, Fla., groundwater pumping has drawn saltwater into aquifers, drained lakes and triggered sinkholes. Decades of pumping by farmers and others have led to sharp declines in critical aquifers that flank the lower Mississippi River."

Meanwhile, Florida and Georgia are fighting in court over farms' and fisheries' use of water from the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint River basin. The case landed before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013 but has not been heard. In early November the court appointed a special master (the second one for the case) to hear arguments, Newman reports. Georgia has talked about getting its slightly irregular border with Tennessee regularized so it can draw water from the Tennessee River, but the Volunteer state isn't volunteering.

Four conservative senators fail in bid to block federal funds for climate-change training for TV meteorologists

A federal inspector general has dismissed an effort by conservative lawmakers to make it harder for TV meteorologists to tell viewers about climate change.

TV meteorologists have emerged as frontline soldiers in the battle to persuade Americans that the Earth's climate is changing, frequently helped with graphics and other resources from nonprofit educational organization Climate Central. "Last year, four climate skeptics in the U.S. Senate demanded an investigation of the $4 million in federal funding provided for the Climate Central program, saying it 'is not science — it is propagandizing,'" James Rainey reports for the Los Angeles Times.

"After a nearly yearlong review, however, the National Science Foundation's inspector general has rejected the claim by the four Republicans — Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and James M. Inhofe and James Lankford, both of Oklahoma. The inspector general’s review 'did not reveal any evidence that limitations on political activity ... were violated,' a memorandum summarizing the investigation said."

About 750 meteorologists across the nation have requested to be on Climate Central's distribution list this year. The program started with 197 meteorologists in 2014 and had increased to 644 by last year, Rainey reports. "Weather people are probably the closest thing that millions of Americans have in terms of daily contact with a person with science training," Climate Central chief executive Ben Strauss told Rainey. "It’s obvious that our weather has been behaving in strange and new ways, and we are simply helping weathercasters to help their audiences understand why."

Climate change poses outsized risk to rural America, much of which has 'limited capacity to respond'

Daily Yonder map; click on the image to enlarge it.

Climate change poses an outsized risk to rural America, according to the recently released National Climate Assessment by climate scientists from 13 federal agencies. That's because rural economies depend more on the outdoors, with industries such as timber, agriculture, ranching, hunting, fishing and other recreation activities dominating. The report has a separate chapter on rural impact, predicting reduced agricultural productivity, degradation of soil and water and increased health challenges to rural people and livestock, and noting that "Residents in rural communities often have limited capacity to respond to climate change impacts, due to poverty and limitations in community resources.

"For portions of rural America with an economy based on agriculture, climate scientists are most worried about shifting geographic suitability of particular crops and abnormal timing for planting and harvest. These changes may result in additional use of herbicides and pesticides, which could create additional health risks from chemical applications," Bryce Oates writes for The Daily Yonder. "Crop and pasture yields and profitability could also be affected by changes in rainfall, temperature and extreme weather events. Increased flooding could increase soil erosion and water pollution from agricultural runoff, according to the report."

The report's authors predict that likely changes in climate patterns will make agricultural commodity markets more volatile, "shift plant and animal ranges, increase the number and intensity of droughts and floods, and increase the number and size of wildfires throughout the rural landscape," Oates reports. Coastal erosion and rising sea levels could flood low-lying areas and disrupt wildlife-centered activities like hunting and fishing. Decreasing snowpack would hurt areas that rely on winter sports like skiing. Increasing forest pests and diseases could decrease timber harvests. And wildfires are predicted to become more frequent, intense and expensive.

The report predicts that adapting to these changes will be more difficult for rural populations, which tend to be older, poorer, and less educated, Oates reports.

Think last month was hotter than usual? Yes, by far

Mean temperature percentiles for May 2018, compared to previous years dating back to 1895

Almost every place in the 48 contiguous states was warmer than normal last month, breaking a record that dates to 1934. And most of a wide swath of the nation, from the Texas Panhandle to Chesapeake Bay, had the warmest May ever. The average temperature in May, 65.4 degrees, was more than 5 degrees above normal, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's latest climate assessment.

The May average "swept by the previous high mark of 64.7 degrees," set during the Dust Bowl era, Jason Samenow writes for The Washington Post. "One of the main reasons May 1934 was so hot was because it was so dry, posting the least precipitation for the month on record. When the land surface is dry, it heats up faster. . . . In May 2018, temperatures soared to record levels even without as much help from dry soils. Precipitation was a hair above normal averaged over the nation. Maryland, hit by major floods in Frederick and Ellicott City, had its wettest May on record. So did Florida. Asheville, N.C., posted 14.68 inches of rain, its wettest month in history."

Samenow adds, "The toasty pattern presented a massive contrast from April, which ranked the 13th-coldest on record, more than 2 degrees below average. Eight states had their warmest May on record: Virginia, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Ohio and Oklahoma."

Ecologists promote carbon farming to stem climate change

Peggy Rathmann and John Wick on their Marin County ranch
(New York Times photo by Jonno Rattman)

UPDATE: For a study on loss of carbon storage capacity in the Midwest, with a map showing cropland expansion, click here.

A deep-dive story from a California ranch illustrates the the role grazing animals can play in improving soil and slowing global warming, Moises Velasquez-Manoff reports for The New York Times.

Children's author Peggy Rathmann and her husband John Wick moved to a 540-acre ranch in Marin County, California, in 1996. It's dairy country, and herds of cows roam the hills, but the couple loved watching deer and other wild animals on their land, so they decided to help it return to a more pristine state by banning a nearby rancher's cows from their land.

But "within months of the herd's departure, the landscape began to change. Brush encroached on meadow. Dried-out, uneaten grass hindered new growth. A mysterious disease struck their oak trees. Their land seemed to be losing its vitality," Manoff reports. "Wick was especially bothered by the advance of a prickly, yellow-flowered invasive weed called the woolly distaff thistle. He pulled it, mowed it, doused it with herbicides. But the distaff kept moving into what had been pasture."

Rangeland ecologist Jeff Creque urged them to invite the cows back: grasslands and grazing animals evolved together, he told them. Grasslands depend on animals to get rid of dead growth and recycle nutrients with manure and urine, so grazing can restore the land if done right. That means allowing cows to roam in herds like wild buffalo, never staying in one place too long. But if the cows are confined to a smaller area for a few months, the land is more likely to suffer.

Creque's advice was proved sound after Wick and Rathmann welcomed cows back to their land the next summer. By the fall, the cows were fat and the land was lush and abundant with wildlife. Creque explained to them that the fat came from carbohydrates in the grass, which came from carbon pulled from the atmosphere. Though most of the carbon humans add to the air is from power and heat generation, agricultural and other land use contributes almost as much."The erosion and degradation of soil caused by plowing, intense grazing and clear-cutting has played a significant role in the atmospheric accumulation of heat-trapping gasses," Manoff reports. "Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, agricultural practices and animal husbandry have released an estimated 135  gigatons -- 125 billion metric tons -- of carbon into the atmosphere."

In recent years, scientists have increasingly advocated trapping more carbon in soil and ecosystems by better land management practices instead of synthetic fertilizers, an idea known as carbon farming. University of California Berkley ecologist Whendee Silver tested the soil on Wick and Rathmann's ranch and found that inviting the cows back had increased the carbon trapped in the soil dramatically. Wick has become an outspoken carbon-farming advocate, and in 2008 founded the Marin Carbon Project along with Creque and Silver. Its goal is to develop science-based carbon-farming practices and establish incentives that will encourage farmers to adopt them.

What about the greenhouse gases from cattle manure? Silver has found that spreading a mixture of manure and compost on fields increases the capture of carbon in the soil, but "No one really know if the carbon they put in the ground more than offsets the methane produced by their cows," Manoff reports. "What they do demonstrate is that augmenting soil carbon while farming is not only possible, but also beneficial, even in a business sense."

States like Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Colorado, Arizona and Montana are considering or have passed legislation encouraging carbon-farming, but California has led the way. "By 2050, the state aims to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions to 20 percent of what they were in 1990. Nearly half its 58 counties have farmers and ranchers at various stages of developing and implementing carbon-farming plans," Manoff reports. Many of those efforts in California owe a debt to the Marin Carbon Project.

Global warming has moved eastward the boundary between the humid Eastern U.S. and drier lands to the west

Earth Interactions map

"A boundary that divides the humid eastern U.S. and the dry Great Plains states appears to have shifted 140 miles to the east over the past century due to global warming," according to a study recently published in Earth Interactions, a journal of the American Meteorological Society, Doyle Rice reports for USA Today. The study's authors say the boundary will likely continue moving east in the future and profoundly affect agriculture, especially corn growers.

The boundary was at 100 degrees west longitude when American geologist John Wesley Powell identified it in 1878. The meridian roughly marks the eastern boundary of the sparsely populated Great Plains. Wheat grows well in the west, but east of the boundary, thirstier crops like corn thrive.

Richard Seager, a climate scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the study's lead author, "predicts that as the line continues to move farther east, farms will have to consolidate and become larger to remain viable," Rice reports. "And unless farmers are able to adapt, such as by using irrigation, they will need to consider growing wheat or another more suitable crop than corn."

Climate change costs billions in extra road repairs

Photo by Jesse Collins, Unsplash

A recent paper in Nature Climate Change says climate change is costing the U.S. billions of dollars in unnecessary road repairs each year. Most road miles in the U.S. are in rural areas, meaning states, counties and small towns are making repairs that some of them can ill afford.

The problem is old data. Engineers consult weather models to see what kind of pavement can best withstand the local climate. But the temperature data for those models runs from 1964 to 1995, and local weather is often different now.

"Using data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, Shane Underwood of Arizona State University and his colleagues show that road engineers have selected materials inappropriate for current temperatures 35 percent of the time over the past two decades," David Trilling reports for Journalist's Resource, a service of the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University. Other findings from the study:

• Failing to adapt to warmer temperatures is adding 3 to 9 percent to the cost of building and maintaining a road over 30 years.

• The authors use two models of predicted warmer temperatures, which suggest between $13.6 and $35.8 billion in extra or earlier-than-normal repairs will be required for roads being built under the current models. In the lower-temperature warming model, this translates to an annual extra cost of between $0.8 billion and $1.3 billion; in the higher-temperature warming model, it is an annual extra cost of between $0.8 billion and $2.1 billion.

• A road built to last 20 years will require repairs after 14 to 17 years under these models.

• In some cases, government transportation agencies are paying too much for materials to withstand cold temperatures that do not currently (and perhaps no longer) exist.

• Because municipal governments in the United States work on tighter road-maintenance budgets than state and federal transportation departments, the extra financial strain will largely impact cities and towns.

Broadcast meteorologists can play a big role in educating the public about climate change

Hurricane Harvey, from International Space Station. (Photo by Randy Bresnik, NASA)

A broad consensus of scientists agree that the extreme weather of recent years--hurricanes, flooding, heat waves and wildfires--is somehow related to climate change, but broadcast meteorologists are often reluctant to talk about it on the air, and some are outright skeptical of the science. "The reasons are complicated, ranging from what meteorologists are taught in college to not wanting to upset their viewers. But they are increasingly changing. I’ve spoken to many former colleagues who want to start having these conversations on air and doing what they can to inform the public about the issue," Sean Sublette writes for Vox.

Sublette writes that he worked for 19 years as a TV weathernan in the Roanoke-Lynchburg, Va., market, and became more and more concerned about climate change as he learned more about it. In 2013, when he was chief meteorologist at the local ABC affiliate, he decided it was time to "speak up about how our planet was changing. This was science, not policy," he writes. He worried that his audience might not want to hear it, but he believed it was important. So, one evening he discussed recent scientific findings about the rising average global temperature and sea levels, and said that they were primarily a result of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels. He posted a blog item sharing the same facts. Then he sat back and waited for the storm. To his surprise, it never came. "No hate mail came; no fussing from my news managers ensued," he writes. He received one comment on his blog post that said, "I don't really like the news, but people need to hear it." He still had to be careful not to go too far to repel his conservative viewers, but he began more confidently including facts about climate change in his broadcasts.

That experience helped him realize other meteorologists might need help talking about climate change on the air. They're in a unique position of influence: "For much of the public, meteorologists are the only scientists people see on a daily basis, so they have a unique position in the media landscape. Talking about climate change from that position could make a real difference in how the public discusses climate change and its solutions. It’s something we increasingly have a responsibility to do," Sublette writes. These days he works for the nonprofit Climate Central's Climate Matters program, which helps broadcast meteorologists talk about climate change with the public.

As the public continues to ask questions and learn about climate change, Sublette says he hopes weathercasters will keep talking about it. "Broadcast meteorologists are some of the most qualified people in the media to discuss the subject and are the liaison between the public and the research-based scientific community. Increasingly they are stepping up, and we hope to see it continue."