Earth’s has gone through major climate changes in the past. They happened on time scales of millions of years and triggered mass extinctions. Our emissions are changing the climate much faster.
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Articles on Carbon cycle
Displaying 21 - 40 of 45 articles
‘Black carbon’ from rainforest fires is settling on glaciers and making them melt faster, according to new research.
Lakes are the final resting place for many of the Earth’s plants – and these organic graveyards are about to get a whole lot busier.
Discussions about climate change often skirt around the issue of population growth, but it is the main driver of rising carbon dioxide levels and many other environmental changes on a planetary scale.
Thousands of years ago, carbon gases trapped on the seafloor escaped, causing drastic warming that helped end the last ice age. A scientist says climate change could cause this process to repeat.
Vast ‘underwater meadows’ would lock up lots of carbon.
New data from a NASA satellite show in unprecedented detail the flow of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Future satellites should even be able to detect the signatures of individual power stations.
Why is it so hard to reach consensus about how to slow climate change? Multiple time lags get in the way: some make it hard to convey the risk, while others prolong the search for solutions.
Pollution has increased carbon in our soils - which is good for climate change. But this carbon may not stay there for long.
Scientists want to exploit a natural process of carbon storage.
Extreme wet years are getting wetter and more common. This means Australia’s terrestrial ecosystems will play a larger role in the global carbon cycle.
When temperatures dipped between 1500 and 1750, the world’s landscapes responded by storing more carbon. Now, with temperatures climbing, it’s possible they will do the opposite and release even more.
Since 1999, Australia has swung between drought and deluge with surprising speed, because El Niño has fallen into sync with similar patterns in the Indian and Southern Oceans.
Global warming is changing the movement of carbon within northern ecosystems to the point where the Arctic could become a net source, rather than sink, of greenhouse gas emissions.
Plans to store more carbon in French soil could have a massive impact on the country’s emissions – if they can pull it off.
Dr Mike Raupach died earlier this week after a brief illness. He passed away peacefully at home with his family in Canberra, Australia. He was 64. Mike was a brilliant and outstanding scientist. He was…
It’s well known that carbon in the atmosphere is causing global warming. What is less well known, outside of scientific circles at least, is the role oceans have to play in this. Our seas contain 60 times…
It’s no exaggeration to say the tropics drive our planet’s carbon cycle – the constant transfer of carbon back and forth, on a global scale, between living things and the environment. Understanding the…
Record-breaking rains triggered so much new growth across Australia that the continent turned into a giant green carbon sink to rival tropical rainforests including the Amazon, our new research shows…
Growth in global carbon emissions is slowing, but is still more than enough to increase global temperatures by more than 2C, according to a report released today by the Global Carbon Project. Carbon emissions…
Top contributors
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Chief Research Scientist, CSIRO Environment; Executive Director, Global Carbon Project, CSIRO
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Professor of Global Change Ecology, University of Cambridge
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University of Technology Sydney
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Emeritus Professor, Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre, Sheffield Hallam University
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Professorial Fellow, The University of Melbourne
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Research scientist, NASA
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Senior Research Scientist, CSIRO
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Snr research fellow in environmental sciences, James Cook University
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Investigador Distinguido del Programa Beatriz Galindo, Palaeoclimatology Lab, Centro de Investigación Mariña, Universidade de Vigo
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Science Writer, University of Pennsylvania
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Professor in Earth Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and Emeritus Professor of Mineral Physics, University of Cambridge
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Visiting Researcher, National Oceanography Centre, University of Southampton
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Departmental Visitor, Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies, Australian National University
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Honorary Professor, Australian National University
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Principal Research Scientist, CSIRO
