As first glance, asking whether global warming results in more snow may seem like a silly question because obviously, if it gets warm enough, there is no snow. Consequently, deniers of climate change have…
Arctic sea ice melts each summer, reaching its minimum extent sometime in September, before refreezing through the winter. Over the past 35 years, the September sea ice extent has reduced by about 35…
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
In the early morning hours of Sunday, December 14th last year, climate negotiators in Lima, Peru concluded the COP-20 talks with an agreement among 195 countries. The Lima Call for Climate Action, or Lima…
What does Paraguay have to do with the global temperature record?
dany13/Flickr
An article in The Australian today has once again raised the question of why scientists, in trying to estimate how the global and regional surface temperatures of Earth may have changed over the past century…
Scientists will be either ineffectual or counter-productive.
EPA
Western liberal democracies believe that in difficult political decisions science serves as a referee and arbiter of truth. Scientific knowledge can indeed inform and narrow the scope of policy choices…
Future Sydney? Climate projections show Sydney’s climate could end up more like Brisbane’s.
Kevin Gibbons/Flickr
Australia is on track for up to 1.7C of warming this century if the world curbs its greenhouse emissions, but under a worst-case scenario could see anything from 2.8C to 5.1C of warming by 2090, according…
Good for plants, bad for the atmosphere.
Roadsidepictures
Carbon dioxide is the “face” of the greenhouse gases, but nitrous oxide (N2O) merits its own spotlight. The same “laughing gas” once used by dentists as an anaesthetic and used today by people looking…
The second hand of the Doomsday Clock is now only three minutes to midnight. This is the closest to apocalypse we have come since 1984 – the coldest of Cold War years, just a year after Able Archer, the…
Climate science is right – but it isn’t winning.
NASA
Scientists tell us that the world is warming and greenhouse gas emissions are to blame. Yet climate change framed by scientists, politicians and economists as a straightforward pollution problem will neither…
El Niño means drought in Australia – and floods in America.
Len Matthews
It’s confirmed: 2014 produced the highest global temperatures since records began in the 1880s. As if that’s not cause enough for concern, this year threatens to see the return of El Niño, which like some…
To find out if the carbon price worked, you have to look at the electricity sector.
Paul Hocksenar/Flickr
Emissions fell by six times the rate in the five years before the carbon tax than they did under the carbon tax. – Environment minister Greg Hunt, The Guardian, January 17, 2015. Australia’s total greenhouse…
Hurricane Sandy pummeled cities along the east coast in 2012, causing billions of dollars of damage.
Shutterstock
Climate change is as much an economic problem as an environmental one. The effects of climate change, such as damage from more severe weather or health problems from higher temperatures, will impose a…
Harvard and Rutgers scientists propose a new, potentially more accurate way, to measure the rate of sea level rise.
Shutterstock
When you ask yourself what the biggest unanswered scientific questions are, “how did sea levels change over the past 100 years?” is unlikely to appear at the top of your list. After all, haven’t we already…
David Cameron’s decision to champion the Green Party’s inclusion in the general election debates has, regardless of his motives, considerably raised the stakes. It has also opened up broader questions…
After mass bleaching in 1998, more than half of coral reefs in the Seychelles have slowly recovered.
Nick Graham
Coral reefs are the poster child for the damage people are doing to the world’s oceans. Overfishing, pollution and declining water quality have all taken their toll on reefs around the world. Perhaps the…
A depot used to store pipes for Transcanada Corp’s planned Keystone XL oil pipeline is seen in Gascoyne, North Dakota.
Andrew Cullen/Reuters
Big energy infrastructure projects – power plants, coal mines, long distance transmission lines – take time, resources and, typically, some political muscle. They create highly visible if short-lived construction…
This is the area that holds strategic importance
Reuters/Balazs Koranyi
In a few short months the United States assumes Chair of the Arctic Council (AC). This is a two-year long opportunity to shape the future of the Arctic, an opportunity that will likely not come around…
Could climate change be making flying more unsafe?
KamrenB Photography
On December 28, AirAsia flight QZ8501 crashed into the sea between Indonesia and Singapore. Shortly before the crash, the pilots requested an alteration to the flight route due to severe weather. While…
Mountain Pygmy Possum numbers are declining due to environmental changes, including earlier snow melt.
AAP/Tim Arch/DSE
Every Spring, the blanket of Australian alpine snow starts to melt, and the Mountain Pygmy Possum wakes up from its seven-month-long hibernation. Naturally after so long under the snow, its first thought…
Horses cool off during an Adelaide heatwave in January 2014.
AAP Image/David Mariuz
2014 has been confirmed as Australia’s third-hottest year, capping off a record-breaking decade, according to the Bureau of Meteorology’s annual climate statement, released today. Seven of Australia’s…