1 . According to reports, three-quarters of all crops around the world depend on pollinating (授粉的) insects like bees and butterflies. By pollinating, pollinators enable the production of seeds. Without them, crop farming can become extremely difficult or costly threatening food supplies and prices globally.

Research has shown a rapid and consistent decline in pollinator populations. Average butterfly populations have almost halved since 1991 and bee populations in particular face a sharp decline. Given the world’s growing dependence on these insects, we can only expect the problem to worsen if no action is taken.

Much has been written about how intensive farming practices the use of chemical pesticides (杀虫剂), and pollution are threatening the survival of these helpful insects. To add to the already critical situation, global warming is contributing significantly to the rapid disappearance of pollinators.

Climate change is a major threat to pollinators, with rising temperatures and increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events affecting the food sources and habitats, on which pollinators depend for their survival.

Climate change also changes the timing and availability of lowering plants, leading to mismatches between pollinators and their food sources. A study has found that climate change has shifted plants’ blooming to earlier times and caused certain plants to move to higher areas, resulting in a decline in pollination.

Another study has found that climate change could lead to a decline in the quality of nectar, which is the main food source for many pollinators. As temperatures rise, the sugar content of nectar decreases, making it less nutritious for pollinators. This leads to a decline in the health and reproductive success of pollinators, as well as a decline in the pollination of plants.

Needless to say, cutting global emissions (排放量) is key. It’s essential that we continue to advocate for emission reductions. From country-level to individual businesses, more concrete roadmaps to net zero are a must.

We must at least minimize, if not prevent, the usage of pesticides, since these chemicals are harmful to pollinators and can have a far-reaching effect on pollination as a whole.

2 . Every spring, in regions at high altitudes around the world, one of Earth’s tiniest migrations takes place. The migrants are single-celled green algae (海藻); they are relatives to plants growing in the sea, but instead of living in the sea they live in snow. They spend the winter deep in the snow. In the spring, they wake and swim up through flowing streams of melted snow to the surface, dividing and photosynthesizing (进行光合作用) as they go. Then, at the top, they turn red. This creates what scientists call pink snow.

The color comes from astaxanthin (虾青素), a substance that gives some living things their reddish color. The algae produce astaxanthin as a form of sun protection; it absorbs UV light, thereby warming the organisms and thus melting the surrounding snow. “The melting helps them a lot,” said Roman Dial, a biologist at Alaska Pacific University. “The moment there is liquid water on the snow, the algae start growing.”

Pink snow is a perfectly natural phenomenon, but in an age of disappearing glaciers (冰川), it is also problematic. Last year, scientists discovered that the algae turned the snow surface dark, reducing the amount of sunlight reflected by some glaciers in Scandinavia—and increasing the amount of sunlight absorbed—by 30%. The result, as Dial and his colleagues demonstrated in this month’s issue of Nature Geoscience, is faster melting. As in other parts of the warming planet—particularly the Arctic, where scientists fear that melting permafrost (永冻土层) may lead to further climatic changes. Ice sheets are already being darkened by dust and ash, which makes the process of melting faster and provides nutrients for algae growth. As the organisms multiply, they melt even more snow, which allows them to increase in their population again. “It spreads more rapidly than people realize, once it gets established,” Dial said.

Snow algae need snow; when that’s gone, which seems to be the direction of things, the snow algae will go, too. Before the snow algae disappear, though, and while there’s still some glacier left, it’s entirely possible that the last snow we’ll see on Earth will be pink or even red, a wound on Earth.

3 . The effects of “weird weather” were already being felt in the 1960s, but scientists linking fossil fuels with climate change were dismissed as prophets of doom (末日预言家).

In August 1974, the ClA produced a study on “climatological research as it is related to intelligence (情报) problems”. The diagnosis was dramatic. It warned of the emergence of a new era of weird weather, leading to political unrest and mass migration (which, in turn, would cause more unrest).

The new era the agency imagined wasn’t necessarily one of hotter temperatures; the CIA had heard from scientists warning of global cooling as well as warming. But the direction in which the temperature was changing wasn’t their immediate concern; it was the political impact. They knew that the so-called “little ice age”, a series of cold snaps between, roughly, 1350 and 1850, had brought not only drought and famine, but also war.

“The climate change began in 1960,” the report’s first page informs us, “but no one, including the climatologists, recognised it.” Crop failures in the Soviet Union and India in the early 1960s had been attributed to standard unlucky weather. The US shipped grain to India and the Soviets killed off livestock to eat . But, the report argued, the world ignored this warning, as the global population continued to grow and states made massive investments in energy, technology and medicine.

Meanwhile, the weird weather rolled on, shifting to a collection of west African countries just below the Sahara. People in Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad “became the first victims of the climate change”, the report argued, but their suffering was masked by other struggles or the richer parts of the world simply weren’t paying attention.

As the effects of climate change started to spread to other parts of the world, the early 1970s saw report s of droughts, crop failures and floods from Myanmar, Pakistan, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Costa Rica, Honduras, Japan, Manila, Ecuador, USSR, China, India and the US.

4 . Temperatures around the North Pole have greatly increased in the last 50 years — changing a long-term natural cooling trend. Now the Arctic is warmer than at any time during the last 2000 years, according to a major new study.

The study, based on an analysis of tree rings and other things, provides compelling evidence that greenhouse gases released since the start of the industrial revolution are causing global warming.

An author, Darrel Kaufman said, “Scientists have known for a while that the current period of warming was coming after a long-term cooling trend. But our reconstruction quantifies the cooling with greater certainty than before.”

The research — published in the journal Science — comes from a team of British and American scientists who followed summer Arctic temperatures to the time of the Romans by studying natural signals in the landscape. Their reconstruction found that the Arctic got cooler in the summer months between 1 AD and 1900, thanks to a natural “wobble” (摇摆) in the Earth’s orbit around the Sun.

The wobble slowly increased the distance between the Earth and the Sun during the Arctic summer, reducing the summer temperatures by around 0.2 degree every thousand years and causing the “Little Ice Age” that led to freezing winters in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.

But during the 20th century, temperatures began to rise greatly — though the amount of sunlight reaching the Arctic during the summer was continuing to fall. The decade between 1999 to 2008 was the warmest in the last 2000 years, the research found. The research has shown that Arctic temperatures rose three times faster during the 20th century than the rest of the Northern Hemisphere.

Some researchers have predicted that the Arctic could be free from sea ice in the winter within the next few decades if the temperatures continue to rise.

5 . A new study finds climate events such as flooding, heat waves and drought worsen more than half of the known diseases that infect people. These diseases include malaria, cholera and anthrax.

Researchers examined medical literature (文献) of established cases of such diseases. They found out that 218 out of the known 375 human infectious diseases seemed to be made worse by extreme weather connected to climate change. The study connected more than 1,000 pathways from climate events to sick people. In some cases, heavy rains and flooding sicken people through disease-carrying mosquitoes, rats and deer. Other events, like warming oceans and heat waves, spoil seafood and droughts bring bats carrying viral infections to people.

Medical doctors, going back to the days of ancient Greek civilization, have long connected disease to weather. But this study shows how widespread the influence of climate events is on human health. “If climate is changing, the risk of these diseases is changing,” said Dr Jonathan Patz. “The findings of this study are terrifying and illustrate well the enormous (巨大的) consequences of climate change on human pathogens (病原体). Humans need to all work together to prevent disasters from climate change.”

Camilo Mora, a climate data expert, said the study is not about predicting future cases. “These are things that have already happened,” he noted. Here’s one example Mora knows from his own experience. About five years ago, Mora’s home in rural Colombia was flooded, creating a breeding ground for mosquitoes. Mora contracted Chikungunya, a virus spread by mosquito bites. He survived, but he still suffers pain related to the disease. In another case, the remains of a reindeer which died from anthrax were unearthed as the Siberian permafrost (永冻土) melted from warming in 2016. A child touched the dead animal, got anthrax, and an outbreak spread.

Dr Aaron Bernstein said the study is a good warning about climate and health for now and the future. He added, “But of course, it only reports on what we already know and what’s yet unknown about pathogens may be yet more compelling about how preventing further climate change may prevent future disasters like COVID-19.”

7 . The heating of the planet is pushing Earth’s polar bear population to its limit, and according to a new study, they could have fewer than 100 years left before extinction.

The polar bears live by hunting seals in the Arctic Ocean, but as more and more ice melts (融化) in that region, their habitat continues to reduce. Since amounts began to be measured at the end of the 1970s, sea ice that lasts for more than a year in the Arctic has decreased at a rate of 13% per decade.

Studies have long shown that declining sea ice will lead to a decline in polar bears, but new research published in Nature Climate Change models a specific doomsday (世界末日) timeline. Polar bears will be unable to endure the effects of climate change over the next several decades, the scientists believe, and will be wiped out by 2100.

“What we’ve shown is that, first, we’ll lose the survival of cubs (幼崽), so cubs will be born, but the females won’t have enough body fat to produce milk to bring them along through the ice-free season, said Dr. Steven Amstrup, chief scientist of Polar Bears

International, to the BBC. “Any of us know that we can only go without-food for so long. That’s a biological reality for all species.”

The study estimated that, even in a situation where countries achieve a moderate (适中的) reduction in greenhouse gases, several populations of polar bears will disappear. But Amstrup emphasized that the animal can still persist (坚持) if climate change does not continue.

“Showing how imminent (迫在眉睫的) the threat is for different polar bear populations-is-another reminder that we must act now to head off the worst of future problems faced by us all,” he said. “The course we’re on now is not a good one, but if society gets its act together, we have time to save polar bears. And if we do, we will benefit the rest of life on Earth, including ourselves.”

9 . The rapid pace of global warming and its effects on habitats raise the question of whether species are able to keep up so that they remain in suitable living conditions. Some animals can move fast to adjust to a quickly changing climate. Plants, being less mobile, rely on means such as seed dispersal (传播) by animals, wind or water to move to new areas, but this redistribution typically occurs within one kilometer of the original plant. Writing in Nature, Juan P. González-Varo sheds light on the potential capacity of migratory (迁徙的) birds to aid seed dispersal.

González-Varo and colleagues report how plants might be able to keep pace with rapid climate change through the help of migrating birds. They analyzed an impressive data set of 949 different seed-dispersal interactions between bird and plant communities, together with data on entire fruiting times and migratory patterns of birds across Europe.

The authors hypothesized (假定) that the direction of seed migration depends on how the plants interact with migratory birds, the frequency of these interactions or the number of bird species that might transport seeds from each plant species.

Perhaps the most striking feature of these inferred seed movements is the observation that 35 percent of plant species across European communities, which are closely related on the phylogenetic tree (进化树谱), might benefit from long-distance dispersal by the northward journey of migratory birds. This particular subset (小组) of plants tends to fruit over a long period of time, or has fruits that persist over the winter. This means that the ability of plants to keep up with climate change could be shaped by their evolutionary history – implying that future plant communities in the Northern Hemisphere (半球) will probably come from plant species that are phylogenetically closely related and that have migrated from the south.

This study provides a great example of how migratory birds might assist plant redistribution to new locations that would normally be difficult for them to reach on their own, and which might offer a suitable climate.

10 . Cold winter coming

Big snowstorms and cold air swept across northern China in the first week of November. Many people trembled in the freezing cold. At the same time, a global meeting on climate change—COP 26—was held in Glasgow, Scotland. There, leaders from around the world tried to deal with global warming.

Why are we experiencing such a cold winter on a warming planet? The cold winter and global warming, two seemingly opposite facts, are not contradictory. Global warming does not happen evenly(均衡地) on Earth, and it causes more extreme heat and cold.

Because of the warming climate, China has seen a growing average temperature in winter. It has increased by 0.41 C every ten years since 1961. But in some cases, the country has also seen freezing cold—for example, the icy weather in early 2008.

Global warming has changed Earth’s air circulation(循环), affecting the local weather through sea-air or land-air interaction. For example, in October, La Nina affected China. It is a weather pattern caused by strong winds above the Pacific Ocean. It brought more cold air to China.

Another reason for the cold weather is the warming Arctic. It is warming almost three times as fast as any other place on Earth. The polar vortex(极地涡旋)—a rotating pool of cold air—becomes unstable as the temperature increases there. So, lots of cold Arctic air then goes southward.

Will this winter be much colder? The official forecast said a cold winter is likely. Northern China will probably see more snow than average, and southern China less rainfall than average.