The launch of an online crowdsourcing database for seagrass hopes to breathe new life into efforts to conserve the underwater flowering plants, which act as both important habitats for marine species and a major store of carbon dioxide. Patchy mapping of seagrass meadows has hampered efforts to protect the plants (which are distinct from seaweed) […]
By Jan Minx, Dr. Sabine Fuss and Gregory Nemet Despite the ambitious long-term climate goals of the Paris agreement, there remains a distinct lack of success at ushering in immediate and sustained reductions in global CO2 emissions. This cognitive dissonance has seen the topic of “negative emissions“—also known as “carbon dioxide removal”—move into the limelight […]
By Marlene Cimons This is one flying insect you don’t want to swat. It doesn’t bite, sting or spread disease. In fact, someday it could be a life- and climate-saver. In time, it could even be used to survey crops, detect wildfires, poke around in disaster rubble searching for survivors and sniff out gas leaks, […]
Maybe you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but two recent studies revealed that old forests around the world are full of surprises. In Europe, scientists working to complete the first ever map of the continent’s old growth forests discovered there were more of them than previously believed. And in South America, a study […]
Newly released emails show that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under Scott Pruitt has routinely been in contact with one of the most prominent climate denier groups, the AP reported this weekend. The emails, obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request by the Environmental Defense Fund and the Southern Environmental Law Center, show […]
A study published Monday in Nature Geoscience discovered a new factor that is lowering the rate at which oceans absorb carbon dioxide, a finding that could have a major impact on future climate change predictions. Currently, around one-fourth of human generated carbon dioxide emissions are absorbed by oceans, making them the world’s largest carbon sink. […]
By Tim Radford Movements of the earth’s crust may mean that global warming driven by greenhouse gases from power stations and vehicle exhausts isn’t the only threat to life the world faces. About 700 million years ago, global temperatures fell so low that glaciers may have reached the equator. Snowball Earth may have all but […]
April 2018 was the 400th consecutive month of global temperatures above the 20th century average, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ( NOAA) announced Thursday. That means the last time Earth was cooler than that average was December 1984—the same month Band Aid released “Do They Know It’s Christmas.” This three-decade streak is not some […]
By Tim Radford Hurricanes are becoming more violent, more rapidly, than they did 30 years ago. The cause may be entirely natural, scientists say. But Hurricane Harvey, which in 2017 assaulted the Gulf of Mexico and dumped unprecedented quantities of rain to cause devastating floods in Texas, happened because the waters of the Gulf were […]
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