Tasmania’s Cape Grim monitoring station passed a crucial carbon dioxide threshold this month.
Bureau of Meteorology
Atmospheric carbon dioxide measurements at Tasmania’s Cape Grim and Antarctica’s Casy Station have now officially passed 400 parts per million and are likely to stay above that for decades to come.
Green planet: tropical rainforests have produced more growth in response to rising carbon dioxide.
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Flickr
Half of the world’s vegetated land has got greener in the past 30 years, mostly driven by rising CO2.
Glacier melt is one of the major contributors to global sea level rise.
Glacier image from www.shutterstock.com
Global average sea level has risen by about 17 cm between 1900 and 2005, but we didn’t know how much of that was due to us, until now.
ESA
Working out how Mars’s carbon dioxide was turned into rock could help with carbon capture efforts on our own planet.
Coral bleaching in March 2016. Rapid rises of greenhouse gases in the past have been linked to major extinctions in the oceans.
XL Catlin Seaview Survey
Carbon dioxide is rising faster than any time in the past 66 million years. Rapid rises in the past have been linked to mass extinctions.
Livestock ‘digestion’ produces nearly 3 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases each year.
Cattle image from www.shutterstock.com
Eating less meat isn’t the only solution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions from livestock.
Fires in Western Australia in January 2015.
AAP IMAGE/ WA Department of Parks and Wildlife
February 2016 was the hottest month by the biggest margin ever. Does that mean global warming has gone into hyperdrive?
Rice cultivation is one of the ways food production pumps methane into the atmosphere.
sandeepachetan.com travel photography/Flickr
Fossil fuel emissions are slowing, but another major climate problem is becoming clear: food production.
An open-cut coal mine in the Hunter Valley.
Bryce Kelly
Methane is a stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and Australia’s coal mines are a major source.
Million-year-old ice likely lies more than 3km below Antarctica’s surface.
Tas van Ommen
Ice cores tell us vital information about how the world’s climate has changed - and how it will change in the future.
The Great Barrier Reef is made up of thousands of individual reefs.
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Flickr
Ocean acidification will hurt some parts of the Great Barrier Reef more than others.
By putting a temporary halt to Obama’s cornerstone climate policy, the Supreme Court puts the next president in the driver’s seat.
tabor-roeder/flickr
Even before the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court’s stay placed the fate of the EPA Clean Power Plan into the hands of the next president.
Shutterstock
If shipping and aviation don’t rein in their emissions it could seriously jeopardise our goal of preventing more than 2°C of warming.
Renewable sources of energy are already more cost-competitive than coal-fired power plants with carbon capture.
rpeschetz/flickr
New analysis reveals carbon capture at coal power plants is significantly more expensive than thought, making renewables and natural gas power generation more attractive.
A worker at a coal power plant in China.
Reuters
The greenhouse gases that cause climate change will take centre stage at the upcoming Paris climate talks. What are they and what are their effects?
from www.shutterstock.com
Cooperation between regulators and the car industry has led to a huge reduction in dangerous emissions – and we can expect further progress.
wallyg/Flickr
Conflicting evidence means it’s tough to tell whether trees helping to clear the air, or if green is not as good as we thought.
Rivers in many agriculturally significant areas of Australia could lose water as the landscape grows greener.
Kerry Raymond/Wikimedia Commons
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.
Carbon in some types of ancient permafrost is digested by greenhouse gas-producing microbes.
US Bureau of Land Management
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.
Sea turtles eating more seagrass could threaten the ocean’s ability to store carbon.
Peter Macreadie
Sharks and other ocean predators help protect the ocean’s carbon stores by keeping other wildlife in check.