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
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 administration has
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
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:
Global carbon dioxide emissions
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
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
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
Harvard University announced today that its endowment has joined Climate Action 100+, an investor-led initiative to ensure that the world’s largest corporate greenhouse gas emitters take steps to address climate change.
As a member of this global network, representing more than $34 trillion in combined assets, Harvard Management Company (HMC) will join other investors
To reduce our impact on the climate and avert disaster, it’s going to take more than switching to high-efficiency
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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