NASA’s former climate chief, James Hansen, is lead author on a paper that predicts rapidly rising seas this century, but not all climate scientists believe the study’s models are convincing.
Some atomic ratio detective work on our solar system neighbors tells us a lot about their watery pasts. That Venus and Mars are mostly dry now could be a cautionary tale for us on the Blue Planet.
New data set includes more accurate data from the Arctic, where more warming has occurred.
NASA
Climate models have been criticised because observations could not find the predicted “hot spot” of strong warming in the troposphere. But analyses now show that the tropospheric hot spot is indeed real.
We cross the 2C threshold at our peril.
Shawn Carpenter/Flickr
Over the past decade, warming air temperatures at Earth’s surface appear to have slowed. But that ignores the vast majority of heat going steadily into the ocean. And, a new paper shows, that makes no difference to the long-term prognosis.
It’s hard to know for sure what role climate change played in the intensity of Cyclone Pam.
AAP Image/Dave Hunt
A causal relationship between cyclone behaviour and anthropogenic global warming is a very real possibility. But most climate scientists hesitate to attribute any single event to global warming.
If you’re always above average, it’s probably time to redefine what’s normal. The new normal for Earth’s climate is systematically rising temperatures.
Despite adjustments to temperature data in the Arctic, the overall global warming trend remains the same.
Flickr/P J Hansen
Attacks on institutions that keep records of global temperatures, such as NASA, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the UK Met Office, and Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology, continue…
A few more trees and a little less aircon and we’d all be in clover.
My Life Graphic
Cities may only occupy about 2% of the world’s habitable land, but they are big drivers of global climate change. Cities are usually hotter than rural areas, and get referred to in the jargon as “urban…
Imagine the smokestacks without the billowing clouds of greenhouse gas pollution.
JuergenGER
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…
Many people around the world, in certain locations, have asked, “where is global warming?” This is because they have experienced very cold wintry conditions and weird weather that they do not associate…
Is anyone listening, and does it matter?
Adrees Latif/Reuters
Humans have so much influence over the global environment today that we have crossed a major threshold in Earth’s long history, entering a new stage in geological time which some scientists call the Anthropocene…
A king tide in New Zealand, part of a project documenting what future sea level rise might look like.
Witness King Tides/Flickr
Human activity is driving sea levels higher. Australia’s seas are likely to rise by around 70 centimetres by 2100 if nothing is done to combat climate change. But 2100 can seem a long way off. At the moment…
The need for caution when any anomaly is revealed in new research.
Flickr/Adam Gerard
UNDERSTANDING RESEARCH: What do we actually mean by research and how does it help inform our understanding of things? What if research throws up a result that calls for a new way of thinking? How do we…
Carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels and cement-making reached 36 billion tonnes in 2013.
Shutterstock
James Whitmore, The Conversation and Emil Jeyaratnam, The Conversation
The latest report on global carbon emissions released this week revealed that carbon dioxide emissions will likely reach 40 billion tonnes this year. Growth in emissions continues to match the worst-case…
A new study finds overwhelming odds that humans have contributed to higher global temperatures – so how much are we willing to gamble that it’s wrong?
Kraevski Vitaly/Shutterstock
There seem to have been a dozen or so explanations for why the Earth’s surface has warmed at a slower rate over the past 15 years compared to earlier decades. This is perhaps not so surprising given the…