The threat that climate change poses to human well-being and the health of the planet is “unequivocal”, says the latest report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). By Carbon Brief The expansive review – which forms the second part of the IPCC’s sixth assessment report (AR6) – warns that any further delay in global action […]
It’s a common argument among climate deniers: scientific models cannot predict the future, so why should we trust them to tell us how the climate will change? This trope recently surfaced in an interview with Canadian psychologist and author Jordan Peterson on Joe Rogan’s podcast. According to Peterson: “There is no such thing as climate… climate […]
The climate scorekeepers at NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information have finished their analysis of 2021 climate and issued their annual summary. By Rebecca Lindsay NOAA Here are the opening remarks: For 2021, the average temperature across global surfaces was 1.51°F (0.84°C) above the 20th-century average. This was the sixth highest among all years in the […]
Last year was filled with extreme weather events across the United States, including unprecedented wildfires, droughts, and heatwaves throughout the midwest and western United States, an intense and deadly winter storm in Texas, and a number of disastrous tropical storms, tornadoes, and flooding events throughout the South and East. Climate change was also a common topic of […]
Allowing global temperatures to temporarily “overshoot” end-of-century targets will drive greater economic loss and more severe climate impacts than staying below these targets throughout the century, new research says. Many future pathways for meeting the 1.5C and 2C warming targets by 2100 project that global temperatures will exceed these goals in the short term – […]
A substantial majority of voters support the Build Back Better Act in its current form and strongly support its provisions, a new poll released yesterday by Data For Progress and Invest in America finds. 64% of voters, including 87% of Democrats, 63% of Independents, and 42% of Republicans, support the Build Back Better Act. By Data […]
The floods across Europe, China and the US in recent months have again brought to the fore the ability of extreme rainfall to take lives, destroy homes and displace communities. Evidence suggests climate change is causing increases in extreme precipitation, leading to a greater risk of flooding in urban areas. As a result, agencies around the world are responding to this threat by […]
At the COP26 summit in Glasgow this week, US president Joe Biden and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen officially launched the Global Methane Pledge. Announced in September, the pledge asks countries to cut their methane emissions by 30% over 2020-30 and agree to stronger reporting standards. In his speech, Biden said “nine countries had signed on” […]
In the Paris Agreement, countries committed to seek to limit the increase in temperature to 1.5℃ above pre-industrial levels. However, even if countries fulfilled their current pledges to reduce emissions, we would still see an increase of around 2.7℃. No wonder that nearly two thirds of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) authors who responded […]
After the second world war, many of Japan’s smartest scientists found jobs in North American laboratories. Syukuro (Suki) Manabe, a 27-year-old physicist, was part of this brain drain. He was working on weather forecasting but left Japan in 1958 to join a new research project by the US Weather Service to develop a numerical model […]
Fig. 1. Left: monthly global temperature anomalies. Right: Nino 3.4 temperature anomaly for past six years and 8 months, and NCEP forecast (green line). By Dr James Hansen and Dr Makiko Sato First the good news: NOAA’s newest prediction for the tropics has a deeper La Nina (Fig. 1, Right), which should keep global temperature […]
There is now a broad consensus that unabated coal power generation must be rapidly phased out if the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement are to be met. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) sees coal use falling by around four-fifths this decade on a 1.5C pathway. The International Energy Agency roadmap for 1.5C says unabated coal power should end by 2030 in advanced economies and […]
The July 2021 Global Climate Summary from NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information was released on Last week, and among the highlights was that the planet’s hottest month of the year was also the hottest July in the 142-year record. By Rebecca Lindsey NOAA From the report: The July 2021 global surface temperature was 1.67°F (0.93°C) above […]
By Kevin Trenberth, National Center for Atmospheric Research The Conversation Climate change has been accumulating slowly but relentlessly for decades. The changes might sound small when you hear about them – another tenth of a degree warmer, another centimeter of sea level rise – but seemingly small changes can have big effects on the world […]
The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has published the first part of its sixth assessment report (AR6), which will form the cornerstone of climate science for the years ahead. Summarizing the “physical science basis” for climate change, the report pulls together the findings from more than 14,000 peer-reviewed studies. By Simon Evans, Josh Gabbatiss, Zeke […]