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…
Category: Climate
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…
Wildfire smoke may ramp up toxic ozone production in cities
Wildfire smoke and urban air pollution bring out the worst in each other. As wildfires rage, they transform their burned fuel into a complex chemical cocktail of smoke. Many of…
Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier ice shelf could collapse within five years
The demise of a West Antarctic glacier poses the world’s biggest threat to raise sea levels before 2100 — and an ice shelf that’s holding it back from the sea…
Climate change could make Virginia’s Tangier Island uninhabitable by 2051
Virginia’s Tangier Island is rapidly disappearing. Rising sea levels are exacerbating erosion and flooding, and could make the speck of land in the Chesapeake Bay uninhabitable within the next few…
The Southern Ocean is still swallowing large amounts of humans’ carbon dioxide emissions
The Southern Ocean is still busily absorbing large amounts of the carbon dioxide emitted by humans’ fossil fuel burning, a study based on airborne observations of the gas suggests. The…
