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Strawberry season in the Northeast usually lasts only four to six weeks, but New Hampshire researchers have figured out how to stretch the harvest form July to Thanksgiving. Researchers with the University of New Hampshire harvested strawberries grown in low tunnels for 19 consecutive weeks. They also found that the 3-foot-tall tunnels significantly increased the percentage of marketable fruit, from an average of about 70 percent to 83 percent. Now in its second year, the research project by the New Hampshire Agricultural Experiment Station is part of a larger, multistate effort to optimize protected growing environments for berry crops in Northeastern states and the Upper Midwest.

Fix cooling, fix the climate? It could help

There's no single solution for climate change, but there is one that would be more effective than others: fixing air-conditioning. Devising greener refrigerant chemicals will never make headlines the way solar installations or electric cars do. But fixing how we cool ourselves may also help fix the climate. New research from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California indicates that adding improved efficiency in refrigeration and phasing out fluorinated gases used for cooling could eliminate a full degree Celsius of warming by 2100. Given that the "business as usual" trajectory leads to 4 to 5 degrees Celsius of warming, that is shaving off a pretty big slice. Hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, account for about 1 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, but they can be thousands of times as potent as carbon dioxide and may account for up to 19 percent of emissions by 2050 if their manufacture continues unchecked.

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