As delegates meet in Bonn for the latest rounds of climate talks, civil society, NGOs, cities, regional governments and businesses, are stepping up to work together toward climate goals.
Global greenhouse gas levels have hit their highest point in at least 3 million years, according to new figures from the World Meteorological Organisation.
Carbon dioxide flux over China, measured by NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 satellite.
NASA
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.
The window for staving off the worst of climate change is wider than we thought, but still pretty narrow.
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It’s still possible to hit the more ambitious of the two Paris global warming goals, according to a new estimate of the global carbon budget. But it sure won’t be easy, and we need to start now.
Sea ice trapped atmospheric carbon dioxide in the last ice age.
Pearse Buchanan
The last ice age locked atmospheric carbon dioxide into oceans, which has major implications for how the oceans and carbon dioxide may be linked in the future.
“Snowball Earth” happened around 700 million years ago.
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Set aside the politics. If by some miracle we turned off carbon emissions immediately, how would the climate respond?
Solar radiation management involves spraying tiny reflective particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect away some of the energy from the sun
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While the gases most responsible for global warming - carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide - continue to climb, other industrial greenhouse gases are being brought gradually under control.
Has carbon capture and storage been tarnished by its association with the coal industry?
Peabody Energy/Wikimedia Commons
Carbon capture and storage gets a bad rap from its associations with ‘clean coal’. But the technology could prove vital in cutting emissions from other industries like steel, cement and chemicals.
Average carbon dioxide concentrations, Oct. 1 -
Nov. 11, 2014, measured by the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 satellite.
NASA
Why use satellites to study Earth’s climate? Researchers leading a new mission explain how images from space will help them analyze which parts of the Americas soak up the most carbon.
Increasing carbon dioxide is impacting some of our favourite foods.
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.
The shipping industry must clean up its act.
Darrin Zammit Lupi/Reuters
Bill Hare, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research e Niklas Höhne, Wageningen University
Phasing out greenhouse gas emissions entirely by mid-century is possible, and promising trends are emerging. But the next five to ten years will be the real test of whether we can make that happen.
The earth’s missing ‘fingerprint’ sits somewhere in the upper atmosphere, but for some reason eludes climatologists.
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Philip Lloyd, Cape Peninsula University of Technology
Without understanding why the ‘fingerprint’ has failed to appear our predictions about global warming - as carbon dioxide concentrations increase - are uncertain.