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Category: Climate Change

Rising seas and melting glaciers: these changes are now irreversible, but we have to act to slow them down

Rising seas and melting glaciers: these changes are now irreversible, but we have to act to slow them down

Shutterstock/slowmotiongli By Nick Golledge, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington After three years of writing and two weeks of virtual negotiations to approve the final wording, the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) confirms that changes are happening in Earth’s climate across every continent and every ocean. My contribution was as one of 15 lead authors to a chapter about the oceans, the world’s icescapes and sea level change — and this…

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Scientists understood physics of climate change in the 1800s – thanks to a woman named Eunice Foote

Scientists understood physics of climate change in the 1800s – thanks to a woman named Eunice Foote

Eunice Foote described the greenhouse gas effects of carbon dioxide in 1856. Carlyn Iverson/NOAA Climate.gov By Sylvia G. Dee, Rice University Long before the current political divide over climate change, and even before the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865), an American scientist named Eunice Foote documented the underlying cause of today’s climate change crisis. The year was 1856. Foote’s brief scientific paper was the first to describe the extraordinary power of carbon dioxide gas to absorb heat – the driving force…

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Russia’s vast wildfires could pump a record amount of climate-warming CO2 into the atmosphere

Russia’s vast wildfires could pump a record amount of climate-warming CO2 into the atmosphere

The Wall Street Journal reports: The smoke from the fires in Russia’s northeast is so thick it has blotted out the sun, plunging swaths of the region into darkness during the brief summer. A state of emergency has been declared in the city of Yakutsk, where freezing winter temperatures have given it the reputation of being the coldest constantly inhabited city on the planet. Residents have been told to stay indoors while volunteers and firefighters brave temperatures surpassing 100 degrees…

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The complexity of the biodiversity crisis

The complexity of the biodiversity crisis

Nature reports: Scientists say it’s clear that there’s a biodiversity crisis, but there are many questions about the details. Which species will lose? Will new communities be healthy and desirable? Will the rapidly changing ecosystems be able to deal with climate change? And where should conservation actions be targeted? To find answers, scientists need better data from field sites around the world, collected at regular intervals over long periods of time. Such data don’t exist for much of the world,…

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Facebook let fossil-fuel industry push climate misinformation, report finds

Facebook let fossil-fuel industry push climate misinformation, report finds

The Guardian reports: Facebook failed to enforce its own rules to curb an oil and gas industry misinformation campaign over the climate crisis during last year’s presidential election, according to a new analysis released on Thursday. The report, by the London-based thinktank InfluenceMap, identified an increase in advertising on the social media site by ExxonMobil and other fossil-fuel companies aimed at shaping the political debate about policies to address global heating. InfluenceMap said its research shows the fossil-fuel industry has…

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Climate crisis: Scientists spot warning signs of Gulf Stream collapse

Climate crisis: Scientists spot warning signs of Gulf Stream collapse

The Guardian reports: Climate scientists have detected warning signs of the collapse of the Gulf Stream, one of the planet’s main potential tipping points. The research found “an almost complete loss of stability over the last century” of the currents that researchers call the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC). The currents are already at their slowest point in at least 1,600 years, but the new analysis shows they may be nearing a shutdown. Such an event would have catastrophic consequences…

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In the infrastructure bill, a recognition: Climate change is a crisis

In the infrastructure bill, a recognition: Climate change is a crisis

The New York Times reports: The bipartisan infrastructure deal struck this week provides new money for climate resilience unmatched in United States history: Tens of billions of dollars to protect against floods, reduce damage from wildfires, develop new sources of drinking water in areas plagued by drought, and even relocate entire communities away from vulnerable places. But the bill is remarkable for another reason. For the first time, both parties have acknowledged — by their actions, if not their words…

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‘Massive melting event’ strikes Greenland after record heat wave

‘Massive melting event’ strikes Greenland after record heat wave

Live Science reports: Greenland’s enormous ice sheet has been struck by a “massive melting event,” with enough ice vanishing in a single day last week to cover the whole of Florida in two inches (5 centimeters) of water, Danish researchers have found. Since July 27, roughly 9.37 billion tons (8.5 billion metric tons) of ice has been lost per day from the surface of the enormous ice sheet — twice its normal average rate of loss during summer, Polar Portal,…

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Biden’s climate plans are stunted after dejected experts fled Trump administration

Biden’s climate plans are stunted after dejected experts fled Trump administration

The New York Times reports: Juliette Hart quit her job last summer as an oceanographer for the United States Geological Survey, where she used climate models to help coastal communities plan for rising seas. She was demoralized after four years of the Trump administration, she said, in which political appointees pressured her to delete or downplay mentions of climate change. “It’s easy and quick to leave government, not so quick for government to regain the talent,” said Dr. Hart, whose…

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Small climate changes can have devastating local consequences – it happened in the Little Ice Age

Small climate changes can have devastating local consequences – it happened in the Little Ice Age

The Little Ice Age brought some bitter extremes. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1565 By Dagomar Degroot, Georgetown University In recent weeks, catastrophic floods overwhelmed towns in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, inundated subway tunnels in China, swept through northwestern Africa and triggered deadly landslides in India and Japan. Heat and drought fanned wildfires in the North American West and Siberia, contributed to water shortages in Iran, and worsened famines in Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya. Extremes like these are increasingly caused…

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Video shows salmon injured by unlivable water temperatures after heatwave

Video shows salmon injured by unlivable water temperatures after heatwave

  The Guardian reports: Salmon in the Columbia River were exposed to unlivable water temperatures that caused them to break out in angry red lesions and white fungus in the wake of the Pacific north-west’s record-shattering heatwave, according to a conservation group that has documented the disturbing sight. In a video released on Tuesday by the non-profit organization Columbia Riverkeeper, a group of sockeye salmon swimming in a tributary of the river can be seen covered in injuries the group…

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The seven climate tipping points that could change the world forever

The seven climate tipping points that could change the world forever

Alexandria Herr, Shannon Osaka, and Maddie Stone report: In 2019 an international team of scientists published a commentary in the celebrated science journal Nature, sounding the alarm of a planet in crisis — and calling for transformative change. “We are in a state of planetary emergency,” they wrote, departing from the usual sterility of scientific writing. “The stability and resilience of our planet is in peril.” Yes, they were writing about climate change, but of a particular kind: climate tipping…

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Stuck in the smoke as billionaires blast off

Stuck in the smoke as billionaires blast off

Naomi Klein writes: Many people here think they are safe from climate change, the journalist from a German newspaper explained to me. They don’t see it as an immediate threat, like Covid-19. They see the Greens as scolds who want to take away their cheap holidays. “What do you have to say to them?” The question came via video call in late June, and I was, at that very moment, pickled in my non-air-conditioned home, gripped by a heatwave that…

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What climate scientists are saying about this catastrophic summer

What climate scientists are saying about this catastrophic summer

Slate reports: By all accounts, the climate crisis is already here. Deadly heat domes across the Pacific Northwest, a petroleum pipeline leak in the middle of the ocean that set the Gulf of Mexico on fire, and the deadly floods in Germany and Belgium in the past few weeks alone have proved that the world is changing in response to how we have changed it.* No one should be surprised by this. For decades, scientists have been ringing the alarm…

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Is climate change happening faster than expected? A climate scientist explains

Is climate change happening faster than expected? A climate scientist explains

Grist reports: Climate scientists have long warned that global warming would lead to extreme heat in many parts of the world. But the 120 degree Fahrenheit temperatures brought on by the heatwave in the Pacific Northwest in June were more in line with what researchers had imagined would occur later this century. “Astonished” is the word Michael Wehner, an extreme weather researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, used to describe his reaction to the heat in an interview with National…

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Climate-driven changes in clouds are likely to amplify global warming

Climate-driven changes in clouds are likely to amplify global warming

Inside Climate News reports: Scientists know that global warming is changing clouds, but they haven’t been sure whether those changes would heat or cool the planet overall. It’s an important question, because clouds have been the main source of uncertainty in projecting just how sensitive the climate is to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations, and because clouds have a huge effect on the climate system. Just a 20 percent change in their extent or reflectivity would have more of an impact…

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