This year is shaping up to be one of the warmest years on record – if not the warmest. This is particularly noteworthy because 2020 is likely to see neutral El Niño/La Niña conditions that will play little-to-no role in boosting annual temperatures. By Zeke Hausfather The first three months of 2020 were the second warmest on record, behind […]
Polar vortexes. Hurricanes. Wildfires. With climate change making extreme weather events more frequent and intense, it is getting harder to keep the lights on and HVAC systems running. By Zhaoyu Wang, Iowa State University The Conversation As a power system researcher, I believe utilities need to get better at withstanding disasters and the disruption they […]
Human-caused climate change is transforming the Arctic, both physically and biologically. Driving this transformation is the rapid warming of land and ocean temperatures. According to the 2018 Arctic Report Card, the annual average air temperature in the Arctic from October 2017 through September 2018 was the second-highest on record, behind the same period for 2015–2016. All […]
Scientists monitoring sea level rise have often focused on Greenland’s southeast and northwest regions where the mammoth glaciers push towards the Atlantic Ocean and deposit iceberg-size chunks of ice. This was described as “a response to both oceanic and atmospheric forcings” and resulted, between 2000 to 2010, in ice loss being concentrated in the southeast and […]
Living things need carbon dioxide to grow and we, humans, are constantly breathing it out. It can’t really be a pollutant…can it? Find out on this Global Weirding episode. By Katherine Hayhoe Global Weirding Since the dawn of the industrial age, humans have been pumping increasing amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by burning […]
Last week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published a special report on 1.5C. It summarised what the latest science says about the impacts of such a rise in the global temperature, as well what the literature says about the ways to avoid it. (For all the details, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth Q&A.) Here, Carbon Brief asks […]
In 2015 in Paris, the United Nations held its Climate Change Conference, COP 21. The world united with an aspirational target of 1.5 degrees Celsius maximum warming and a harder target of 2 degrees. But what did that half of a degree mean? It was clearly significant, as it’s still 10% of the warming that melted most […]
A new study just out in Science attributes the unusually active 2017 Atlantic hurricane season to tropical Atlantic warming. Furthermore, it attributes that warmth to human-caused climate change (a combination of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations and sulphate “aerosols” from industrial pollution). The study is based on a single climate model, but at least in terms of their bottom-line conclusion, there […]
It seems that every advancement in our collective understanding of climate science darkens the picture: warmer temperatures, shorter time frames, and broader impacts. Happily, the opposite seems to be true in our economic understanding of climate solutions, specifically a carbon pricing solution to GHG emissions. By Dr. Philip Harding, Citizens’ Climate Lobby Economics Policy Network […]
Temperatures on the Earth’s surface in the first half of 2018 were lower than over the same period for the three previous years. This was due, in part, to a moderate La Niña event during late 2017 and the first half of 2018. However, the world is quickly switching to El Niño conditions, which should contribute […]
Scientists agree that cutting global greenhouse emissions as soon as possible will be key to tackling global warming. But, with global emissions still on the rise, some researchers are now calling for more research into measures that could be taken alongside emissions cuts, including – controversially – the use of “solar geoengineering” technologies. By Daisy Dunne Carbon Brief This […]
Since retiring from the Congress, former Senators Trent Lott, a conservative Republican from Mississippi, and John Breaux, a conservative Democrat from Louisiana, have spent many years as oil industry lobbyists. That being the case, it clearly came as a surprise to many people that they put together a political action committee (PAC) to support a […]
A major challenge to organizing and advocacy around climate change is how even to approach a problem so large, complex, and gradually advancing (although it feels less gradual with every year, to be honest). An advocacy group that launched in 2014 has one answer—we respond like we’re at war. By Tate Williams Inside Philanthropy For the Climate Mobilization […]
Direct measurements show the amount of oxygen in the global oceans has decreased by around 2% over the past 50 years. Climate change is thought to be a principal cause of this “deoxygenation”, affecting how much oxygen seawater can hold and the circulation patterns that carry oxygen-rich water to the deeper ocean. By Prof Andreas Oschlies, Prof Peter […]
Using the Earth as a community toilet is finally having the effects scientists have been warning us about for decades. But as the Earth burns, our leaders have fiddled, frittering away nearly every chance to rein in the destruction before it is too late. Now the point of no return may be upon us. By […]