Centuries ago, estuaries around the world were teeming with birds and turbulent with schools of fish, their marshlands and endless tracts of channels melting into the gray-blue horizon. Fast-forward to today, and in estuaries such as New York Harbor, San Francisco Bay and Miami’s Biscayne Bay – areas where rivers meet the sea – 80% to […]
Summer 2024 was officially the Northern Hemisphere’s hottest on record. In the United States, fierce heat waves seemed to hit somewhere almost every day. Phoenix reached 100 degrees for more than 100 days straight. The 2024 Olympic Games started in the midst of a long-running heat wave in Europe that included the three hottest days […]
One proposed method for reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere – and reducing the risk of climate change – is to capture carbon from the air or prevent it from getting there in the first place. However, research from Mark Z. Jacobson at Stanford University, published in Energy and Environmental Science, suggests that carbon capture technologies can cause […]
Every increment of global warming above 1.5C increases the risk of crossing key tipping points in the Earth system – even if the overshoot is only temporary, says new research. It is well established that if global temperatures exceed 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, there is a higher risk that tipping points will be crossed. By Ayesha Tandon Carbon […]
Accumulating evidence supports the interpretation in our Pipeline paper: decreasing human-made aerosols increased Earth’s energy imbalance and accelerated global warming in the past decade. Climate sensitivity and aerosol forcing, physically independent quantities, were tied together by United Nations IPCC climate assessments that rely excessively on global climate models (GCMs) and fail to measure climate forcing […]
This year’s string of record-breaking disasters – from Hurricane Lee to deadly wildfires and catastrophic floods to record-high ocean temperatures and record-low sea ice in Antarctica – seems like an acceleration of human-induced climate change. And it is. But not only because greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. What we are also observing is the […]
Global temperature in June and July (Fig. 1) shot far above the prior records for those months for the 140 years of good instrumental data. Early indications are that warming exceeds expectation based on only the long-term trend due to increasing greenhouse gases (GHGs) plus the emerging El Nino. Three additional mechanisms will have a […]
Our team used superglue as a starting material to develop a low-cost, recyclable and easily produced transparent plastic called polyethyl cyanoacrylate that has properties similar to those of plastics used for single-use products like cutlery, cups and packaging. Unlike most traditional plastics, this new plastic can be easily converted back to its starting materials, even […]
The U.S. Senate and House of Representatives both passed a resolution last week nullifying a Labor Department rule that allows money managers to weigh climate change and other environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors when making investment decisions. The resolution now heads to President Biden’s desk for a veto. By The Union of Concerned Scientists […]
Welcome to the third week of the 2023 season of EcoRight Speaks! I am so pleased that I got to have this conversation with Chris Neidl from the Open Air Collective. By Chelsea Henderson EcoRight News/ RepublicEN As you will hear, Chris is passionate about carbon dioxide removal (CDR), a critical component of the battle to solve […]
By at least one measure, China now leads the world in producing high-quality science. My research shows that Chinese scholars now publish a larger fraction of the top 1% most cited scientific papers globally than scientists from any other country. Caroline Wagner, The Ohio State University The Conversation I am a policy expert and analyst […]
Nuclear fusion holds huge promise as a source of clean, abundant energy that could power the world. Now, fusion researchers at a national laboratory in the US have achieved something physicists have been working towards for decades, a process known as “ignition”. This step involves getting more energy out from fusion reactions than is put in […]
American scientists have announced what they have called a major breakthrough in a long-elusive goal of creating energy from nuclear fusion. The U.S. Department of Energy said on Dec. 13, 2022, that for the first time – and after several decades of trying – scientists have managed to get more energy out of the process than […]
World leaders and climate experts are gathering for pivotal United Nations climate change talks in Egypt. Known as COP27, the conference will aim to put Earth on a path to net-zero emissions and keep global warming well below 2℃ this century. The world must rapidly decarbonise to avoid the most dangerous climate change harms. World […]
People in Central and Southern Europe, Northern Africa, and the Middle East realize that their summer climate is becoming noticeably hotter (Fig. 1). And there is already more warming “in the pipeline” due to existing greenhouse gas (GHG) amounts than the warming that has occurred so far, as we describe in a paper (“Global Warming […]