Many of the temperatures presently being recorded in Africa, and those projected in the next decade, are already close to the limits of human survival, or “liveability”.
Scientific instruments in space today can monitor hurricane strength, sea level rise, ice sheet loss and much more.
Christina Koch/NASA
Take a closer look at what’s driving climate change and how scientists know CO2 is involved, in a series of charts examining the evidence in different ways.
David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian are this year’s winners.
Jessica Gow / POOL/ EPA-EFE
The US is shifting to a new set of climate ‘normals’ – data sets averaged over the past 30 years. But normal is a relative concept in a time of climate change.
Groundwater was once thought to buffer streams from warming, but an inexpensive new technique shows streams fed by shallow groundwater may be just as susceptible as those without.
Pikas – small cousins of rabbits – live mainly in the mountainous US west. They’ve been called a climate change poster species, but they’re more adaptable than many people think.
Hurricanes Sally and Paulette, Tropical Depression Rene, and Tropical Storms Teddy and Vicky were all active on Sept. 14, 2020.
NOAA
There were so many tropical storms in 2020, forecasters exhausted the list of names and started using Greek letters. And that’s only one reason 2020 was extreme.
Michael Gurven, University of California, Santa Barbara and Thomas Kraft, University of California, Santa Barbara
‘Normal’ body temperature has declined in urban, industrialized settings like the US and UK. Anthropologists find the trend extends to Indigenous people in the Bolivian Amazon – but why?
The study examined patterns of Twitter rage in hot and cold weather. Given anger spreads through online communities faster than any other emotions, the findings are important.
Much of India experiences both extreme heat and extreme air pollution, as seen in this photo of the Akshardham Hindu temple. Days with both are going to increase.
Sajjad Hussain/AFP via Getty Images
In South Asia, days with both extreme heat and extreme pollution are expected to increase 175% by 2050. Separately, the health effects are bad; together they will likely be worse.
High temperatures, periods of increased relative humidity and more rainfall are likely to happen more in Nigeria’s coastal region under future global warming.