It doesn’t have to be this way. The world already has the know-how and tools to dramatically reduce emissions from fossil fuels — but we need to use those tools…
Category: Earth
A global warming pause that didn’t happen hampered climate science
It was one of the biggest climate change questions of the early 2000s: Had the planet’s rising fever stalled, even as humans pumped more heat-trapping gases into Earth’s atmosphere? By…
Corals may store a surprising amount of microplastics in their skeletons
A surprising amount of plastic pollution in the ocean may wind up in a previously overlooked spot: the skeletons of living corals. Up to about 20,000 metric tons of tiny…
Wally Broecker divined how the climate could suddenly shift
It was the mid-1980s, at a meeting in Switzerland, when Wally Broecker’s ears perked up. Scientist Hans Oeschger was describing an ice core drilled at a military radar station in…
Forests help reduce global warming in more ways than one
When it comes to cooling the planet, forests have more than one trick up their trees. Tropical forests help cool the average global temperature by more than 1 degree…
Smoke from Australia’s intense fires in 2019 and 2020 damaged the ozone layer
Towers of smoke that rose high into the stratosphere during Australia’s “black summer” fires in 2019 and 2020 destroyed some of Earth’s protective ozone layer, researchers report in the March…
Even the sea has light pollution. These new maps show its extent
The first global atlas of ocean light pollution shows that large swaths of the sea are squinting in the glare of humans’ artificial lights at night. From urbanized coastlines along…
How did we get here? The roots and impacts of the climate crisis
Even in a world increasingly battered by weather extremes, the summer 2021 heat wave in the Pacific Northwest stood out. For several days in late June, cities such as Vancouver,…
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…
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…
