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How climate change may shape the world in the centuries to come
It’s hard to imagine what Earth might look like in 2500. But a collaboration between science and art is offering an unsettling window into how ongoing climate change might transform now-familiar terrain into alien landscapes over the next few centuries. These visualizations — of U.S. Midwestern farms overtaken by subtropical plants, of a dried-up Amazon rainforest, of extreme heat baking the Indian subcontinent — emphasize why researchers need to push climate projections long past the customary benchmark of 2100, environmental social scientist Christopher Lyon and colleagues contend September 24 in Global Change Biology. Fifty years have passed since the first climate projections, which set that distant target at 2100, says…
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The science everyone needs to know about climate change, in 6 charts
With the United Nations’ climate conference in Scotland turning a spotlight on climate change policies and the impact of global warming, it’s useful to understand what the science shows. I’m an atmospheric scientist who has worked on global climate science and assessments for most of my career. Here are six things you should know, in charts. What’s driving climate change The primary focus of the negotiations is on carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that is released when fossil fuels – coal, oil and natural gas – are burned, as well as by forest fires, land use changes and natural sources. The Industrial Revolution of the late 1800s started an enormous…
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Climate experts warn world leaders 1.5C is ‘real science’, not just talking point | Cop26
The 1.5C temperature limit to be discussed by world leaders at critical meetings this weekend is a vital physical threshold for the planet’s climate, and not an arbitrary political construct that can be haggled over, leading climate scientists have warned. World leaders are meeting in Rome and Glasgow over the next four days to thrash out a common approach aimed at holding global temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, the lower of two limits set out in the 2015 Paris climate agreement. But some countries are unwilling to peg their emissions plans to the tougher goal, as it would require more urgent efforts. They prefer to consider long-term goals…
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An ample Great Barrier Reef coral offers hope amidst climate change
A coral the size of a carousel is the widest known in the Great Barrier Reef. Found just off the coast of Goolboodi Island in Northeast Australia, this reef-building Porites measures 10.4 meters in diameter — earning it the nickname Muga dhambi, or “big coral,” from the Indigenous custodians of the island, the Manbarra people. In addition to its record-setting width, Muga dhambi stands a little over 5 meters tall, making it the sixth tallest coral in the Great Barrier Reef, researchers report August 19 in Scientific Reports. “It’s a stand-alone coral … and we don’t see many that size,” says marine scientist Nathan Cook of Reef Ecologic, a climate…
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Ignoring climate change will yield ‘untold suffering,’ panel of 14,000 scientists warns
Nearly 14,000 scientists have signed a new climate emergency paper, warning that “untold suffering” awaits the human race if we don’t start tackling global warming head-on, effective immediately. The new paper, published July 28 in the journal BioScience and led by researchers from Oregon State University, is an update of a 2019 paper that declared a global “climate emergency” and evaluated Earth’s vital signs based on 31 variables — including greenhouse gas emissions, surface temperature changes, glacial ice mass loss, Amazon rainforest loss, plus various social factors like global gross domestic product (GDP) and fossil fuel subsidies. Unsurprisingly, the authors of the new paper find that Earth‘s vitals have only…
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Thousands of scientists warn climate tipping points ‘imminent’ | Climate News
Thousands of scientists have repeated calls for urgent action to tackle the climate emergency, warning that several tipping points are now imminent. The researchers, part of a group of more than 14,000 scientists who have signed on to an initiative declaring a worldwide climate emergency, said in an article published in the journal BioScience on Wednesday that governments had consistently failed to address “the overexploitation of the Earth”, which they described as the root cause of the crisis. Since a similar assessment in 2019, they noted an “unprecedented surge” in climate-related disasters, including flooding in South America and Southeast Asia, record-shattering heatwaves and wildfires in Australia and the US, and…
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Studies add to concern about climate tipping
IMAGE: Professor Michael Ghil: “These results indicate that climate tipping is an imminent risk in the Earth System. Even the safe operating space of 1.5 or 2.0 degrees above present generally… view more Credit: Philippe Bruère Two model studies document the probability of climate tipping in Earth subsystems. The findings support the urgency of restricting CO2 emissions as abrupt climate changes might be less predictable and more widespread in the climate system than anticipated. The work is part of the European TiPES project, coordinated by the University of Copenhagen, Denmark but was conducted by Professor Michael Ghil, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France and coauthours from The Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium…
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