Rising carbon dioxide levels are making plants grow faster, sucking up more water and reducing river flows in many agriculturally important areas of Australia, according to new research.
Scientists are studying how carbon-rich permafrost known as yedoma acts much like frozen vegetables to hungry microbes – and is becoming an additional source of heat-trapping gases.
The dust storm that turned Sydney red in 2009 triggered plankton blooms in the Tasman Sea, demonstrating how we might fertilise the ocean to take up more carbon dioxide.
If we burned all fossil fuels, the loss of ice in Antarctica would raise sea levels 160 to 200 feet, but even our current trajectory could lead to dramatic sea level rise.
No matter how much we reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it will not be enough to keep global warming below 2C. Does this mean we should give up? Not at all.
Scientists build network of inexpensive air monitors to track emissions with fine-grained spatial detail – an alternative to satellites or pricey land-based CO2 monitors.
We have hit a new milestone in carbon dioxide levels: the average for February topped 400ppm. It’s the first time this has happened in the northern winter, when levels are typically lower than in summer.
Emissions fell by six times the rate in the five years before the carbon tax than they did under the carbon tax. – Environment minister Greg Hunt, The Guardian, January 17, 2015. Australia’s total greenhouse…
Earth’s climate is changing rapidly. We know this from billions of observations, documented in thousands of journal papers and texts and summarized every few years by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental…
You may not have heard of them or given them much thought, but phytoplankton — the microscopic plants that grow throughout the world’s oceans — are the foundation of oceanic food webs. Although tiny, they…
If you use the full Kyoto period — 1990 to 2020 — the US is minus 5% and Australia is almost exactly the same. Environment minister Greg Hunt, Radio National, November 17. *We and the United States are…
Most of the energy that fuels our lives comes from plants. Whether it is a fossil fuel that was formed hundreds of millions of years ago or the food we eat, all carbon-borne energy has its ultimate origins…
“But who do you think’s right, Prof? The optimists or the pessimists?” At the end of my sustainability economics course in 2007, students were challenging me to end 20 years of professional fence-sitting…