The deadly tornado outbreak that tore through communities from Arkansas to Illinois on the night of Dec. 10-11, 2021, was so unusual in its duration and strength, particularly for December, that a lot of people including the U.S. president are asking what role climate change might have played – and whether tornadoes will become more […]
The recent Glasgow climate pact committed 197 countries to “phas[ing] down unabated coal”. Unabated coal refers to when power stations or factories burn coal without capturing and storing the carbon dioxide (CO₂) generated. Kian Mintz-Woo, University College Cork The Conversation Because the world has made such little progress in eliminating coal, oil and fossil gas, […]
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 […]
By Tom Corringham, University of California San Diego The Conversation Ask people to name the world’s largest river, and most will probably guess that it’s the Amazon, the Nile or the Mississippi. In fact, some of Earth’s largest rivers are in the sky – and they can produce powerful storms, like the ones now […]
When WMAR, Baltimore’s first television station, began broadcasting in 1947, a local public relations official saw an opportunity. Lynn Poole had recently been named the first director of public relations at Johns Hopkins University, and he was looking for ways to promote the institution’s cutting-edge research. So when word got out that WMAR was looking for […]
Each of its carbon-sucking units is the size of a shipping container, yet the world’s largest direct air capture machine – the Orca plant in Iceland – only captures and stores about 4,000 tonnes of CO₂ a year. That’s about three seconds’ worth of global emissions. By Johanna Forster, University of East Anglia and Naomi […]
As a climate scientist myself, I was excited to learn that Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi have been awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize for Physics. I first met Manabe when I was a graduate student in the early 1970s, so I was particularly pleased that the prize recognizes the profound importance of Manabe’s […]
I urge everybody to call Governor Newsom at (916) 445-2841 and ask him to sign SB 821 to restore funding for the Delta Independent Science Board, or send him a message using this form: https://govapps.gov.ca.gov/gov40mail/. By Dan Bacher Deirdre Des Jardins explains on her California Water Research blog (cah2oresearch.com) the background behind the Delta Independent Science […]
Long before the current political divide over climate change, and even before the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865), an American scientist named Eunice Foote documented the underlying cause of today’s climate change crisis. By Sylvia G. Dee, Rice University The Conversation The year was 1856. Foote’s brief scientific paper was the first to describe the extraordinary […]
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 […]
Forecasters are warning about the potential for dangerous storm surge as Tropical Storm Henri strengthens on a path that could take it near or over New York’s Long Island and into New England during the weekend of Aug. 21, 2021. The storm was expected to reach the area right at full moon, when high tides […]
The new report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) marks the latest comprehensive effort by the world’s climate scientists to summarise the evidence underpinning their discipline. As its name implies, the sixth assessment report (AR6) – the first part of which, working group 1 (WG1), was published this week – is the latest in a series which […]
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 […]
July global temperature (+1.16°C relative to 1880-1920 mean) was within a hair (0.02°C) of being the warmest July in the era of instrumental measurements (Fig. 1, left). That’s remarkable because we are still under the influence of a fairly strong La Nina (Fig. 1, right). Global cooling associated with La Ninas peaks five months after the […]