Climate Change

Life and Death in Our Hot Future Will Be Shaped by Today’s Income Inequality

It’s one of the scariest questions facing billions of humans on a hotter planet: How many of us will die from extreme heat in the decades ahead?

Your future risk of dying from heat will be determined more than anything else by where you live and the local consequences of today’s economic inequality. That’s

Climate change and COVID-19: The denial playbook is the same

The phrase “every disaster movie begins with a scientist being ignored” resonates more than ever as two disasters unfold: the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change. One is occurring with horrifying rapidity and one more slowly; both would be far less damaging if scientific advice were heeded earlier.

In the United States, the Trump  has

The Coronavirus Pandemic Shows Us The Importance Of Combating Climate Change

The common fruit fly – which lives one to two months, suggesting insignificance – has changed the world through medical research, leading to eight Nobel prizes in human genetics and disease prevention breakthroughs. Today an even smaller organism, Coronavirus, is changing the world even more significantly.

And confronting it with

10 ways coronavirus is changing energy and climate change

The novel coronavirus, upending our world as we know it, is also changing how we consume energy and address climate change.

Driving the news: The various impacts are occurring both now and into the future. Most changes don’t bode well for acting on climate change and transitioning to cleaner energy.

Five changes happening now:

Lower emissions

Global carbon dioxide emissions

Why don’t we treat the climate crisis with the same urgency as coronavirus?

It is a global emergency that has already killed on a mass scale and threatens to send millions more to early graves. As its effects spread, it could destabilise entire economies and overwhelm poorer countries lacking resources and infrastructure. But this is the climate crisis, not the coronavirus. Governments are not assembling emergency

1.9 billion people at risk from mountain water shortages, study shows

A quarter of the world’s population are at risk of water supply problems as mountain glaciers, snow-packs and alpine lakes are run down by global heating and rising demand, according to an international study.

The first inventory of high-altitude sources finds the Indus is the most important and vulnerable “water tower” due to

While global leaders messed around, Greta Thunberg and 15 kids got down to business

The United Nations’ secretary-general António Guterres wanted international leaders to bring plans, not speeches to the Climate Action Summit being held in New York today. Greta Thunberg and 15 other young people don’t seem to have much faith in these plans. On Monday, hours after Thunberg addressed assembled leaders at the summit’s opening ceremony, the

The most effective ways to curb climate change might surprise you

The planet is barreling toward 1.5 degrees of global warming as soon as 2030 unless we enact “unprecedented changes in all aspects of society,” a dire United Nations report warned in October.

To reduce our impact on the climate and avert disaster, it’s going to take more than switching to high-efficiency

Climate change to shrink economies

Prevailing economic research anticipates the burden of climate change falling on hot or poor nations. Some predict that cooler or wealthier economies will be unaffected or even see benefits from higher temperatures.

However, a new study co-authored by researchers from the University of Cambridge suggests that virtually all countries — whether rich or poor, hot or

2019-08-26T03:35:22-05:00Tags: |

Climate Change Threatens the World’s Food Supply, United Nations Warns

The world’s land and water resources are being exploited at “unprecedented rates,” a new United Nations report warns, which combined with climate change is putting dire pressure on the ability of humanity to feed itself.

The report, prepared by more than 100 experts from 52 countries and released in summary form in Geneva on Thursday, found

Fastest climate warming than in the last 2,000 years’

Many people have a clear picture of the “Little Ice Age” (from approx. 1300 to 1850). It’s characterized by paintings showing people skating on Dutch canals and glaciers advancing far into the alpine valleys. That it was extraordinarily cool in Europe for several centuries is proven by a large number of temperature reconstructions using tree

2019-07-25T06:05:07-05:00Tags: |

Could climate change make Siberia more habitable?

Large parts of Asian Russia could become habitable by the late 21st century due to climate change, new research has found.

A study team from the Krasnoyarsk Federal Research Center, Russia, and the National Institute of Aerospace, USA, used current and predicted climate scenarios to examine the climate comfort of Asian Russia and

2019-07-02T09:50:57-05:00Tags: |

Could climate change make Siberia more habitable?

Large parts of Asian Russia could become habitable by the late 21st century due to climate change, new research has found.

A study team from the Krasnoyarsk Federal Research Center, Russia, and the National Institute of Aerospace, USA, used current and predicted climate scenarios to examine the climate comfort of Asian Russia and work out the

2019-06-11T07:11:45-05:00Tags: |

Changes in rainfall have already impacted water quality

Changes in temperature and precipitation have already impacted the amount of nitrogen introduced into U.S. waterways, according to new research from a team of three Carnegie ecologists published this week in Environmental Science & Technology.

Nitrogen from agriculture and other human activities washes into waterways, which, in excess, creates a dangerous phenomenon called eutrophication. This can

2019-04-25T06:35:09-05:00Tags: |

Global warming disrupts recovery of coral reefs

The damage caused to the Great Barrier Reef by global warming has compromised the capacity of its corals to recover, according to new research published today in Nature.

“Dead corals don’t make babies,” said lead author Professor Terry Hughes, Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University (JCU). “The

2019-04-03T16:13:39-05:00Tags: |

Humanitarian crises and climate change—

Burundi, Chad and Sudan are home to some of the world’s largest displaced populations and vulnerable communities.

Burundi’s Gitega Province, which has one of the country’s highest population densities, hosts several thousands of people in refugee settlements and camps. About 96 per cent of families use fuelwood as a primary energy source for cooking.

In 2015, Burundi

2019-03-28T07:01:29-05:00Tags: |

Rainfall changes for key crops predicted

Even if humans radically reduce greenhouse gas emissions soon, important crop-growing regions of the world can expect changes to rainfall patterns by 2040. In fact, some regions are already experiencing new climatic regimes compared with just a generation ago. The study, published March 11 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, warns that up

2019-03-16T08:37:14-05:00Tags: |

Research connects dots among ocean dynamics, drought and forests

In a time of drastic change, humans look for predictability. A recent study led by a University of Wyoming researcher found that even in dramatically changing climates, mechanisms can be found that predict how those changes will play out. The last ice age was 11,000 years ago and, since then, climates have continuously changed, triggering

2019-03-13T09:51:26-05:00Tags: |

Climate change is shifting productivity of fisheries worldwide

Fish provide a vital source of protein for over half the world’s population, with over 56 million people employed by or subsisting on fisheries. But climate change is beginning to disrupt the complex, interconnected systems that underpin this major source of food.

A team of scientists led by Christopher Free, a postdoctoral scholar at UC Santa

2019-03-04T09:26:57-06:00Tags: |
Go to Top