Neither adaptation by humankind nor mitigation alone is enough to reduce the risk from climate impacts, hundreds of the world’s scientists say. Nothing less than a concerted, global effort to…
Category: Climate
Freshwater ice can melt into scallops and spikes
Water’s wacky density leads to strange effects that researchers are still uncovering. Typically, liquids become denser the more they cool. But freshwater is densest at 4° Celsius. As it cools…
Satellites have located the world’s methane ‘ultra-emitters’
A small number of “ultra-emitters” of methane from oil and gas production contribute as much as 12 percent of methane emissions from oil and gas production every year to the…
The past’s extreme ocean heat waves are now the new normal
Yesterday’s scorching ocean extremes are today’s new normal. A new analysis of surface ocean temperatures over the past 150 years reveals that in 2019, 57 percent of the ocean’s surface…
Intense drought or flash floods can shock the global economy
Extremes in rainfall — whether intense drought or flash floods — can catastrophically slow the global economy, researchers report in the Jan. 13 Nature. And those impacts are most felt…
Africa’s ‘Great Green Wall’ could have far-reaching climate effects
Africa’s “Great Green Wall” initiative is a proposed 8,000-kilometer line of trees meant to hold back the Sahara from expanding southward. New climate simulations looking to both the region’s past…
Climate change communication should focus less on specific numbers
What’s in a number? The goals of the 2021 United Nations’ climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, called for nations to keep a warming limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius “within reach.”…
Vikings may have fled Greenland to escape rising seas
In 1721, a Norwegian missionary set sail for Greenland in the hopes of converting the Viking descendants living there to Protestantism. When he arrived, the only traces he found of…
How electric vehicles offered hope as climate challenges grew
This was another year of bleak climate news. Record heat waves baked the Pacific Northwest. Wildfires raged in California, Oregon, Washington and neighboring states. Tropical cyclones rapidly intensified in the…
How a warming climate may make winter tornadoes stronger
NEW ORLEANS — Warmer winters could make twisters more powerful. Though tornadoes can occur in any season, the United States logs the greatest number of powerful twisters in the warmer…
