Is Industrial Pollution Causing Natural Disasters?
Particles in polluted air seed clouds and influence the temperatures of oceans, which could stir up severe weather phenomena.
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Carbon Dioxide Linked to End of Last Ice Age
The circumstances that ended the last ice age, somewhere between 19,000 and 10,000 years ago, have been unclear. In particular, scientists aren’t sure how carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, played into the giant melt. New research indicates it did in fact help drive this prehistoric episode of global warming, even though it did not kick…
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Global Warming Started More Than 100 Years Ago
It’s widely believed that global warming began in the 1970s, but new ocean temperature readings show that the Earth has in fact been warming for far longer. A study by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego traced ocean warming to the late 19th century, which implies, say researchers, that the Earth’s climate as…
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Human Engineering Could Fight Climate Change
So far, conventional solutions to global warming — new government policies and changes in individual behavior — haven’t delivered. And more radical options, such as pumping sulfur into the atmosphere to counteract warming, pose a great deal of risk. There may be another route to avoid the potentially disastrous effects of climate change: We can…
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Scientists Look to the (Diminishing) Ice to Explain ‘Weather Weirding’
Lurching from one weather extreme to another seems to have become routine across the Northern Hemisphere. Parts of the United States may be shivering in March, but Scotland is setting heat records. Across Europe, people died by the hundreds during a severe cold wave in the first half of February, but a week later revelers…
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Most Cities Unprepared for Coming Population Boom
The world’s cities are mushrooming at the rate of around 1 million people a week as the planet’s population heads toward 9 billion people by 2050 from 7 billion now. Urban areas are set to sprawl over an extra area equivalent to most of Europe within 20 years, yet little is being done to prepare for…
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Farming Needs ‘Climate-Smart’ Change
Major changes are needed in agriculture and food consumption around the world if future generations are to be adequately fed, a major report warns. Farming must intensify sustainably, cut waste and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from farms, it says. The Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change spent more than a year assessing evidence from…
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Link Builds Between Weather Extremes and Global Warming
Extreme weather events over the past decade have increased and were “very likely” caused by manmade global warming, a study in the journal Nature Climate Change stated. Scientists at Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Research used physics, statistical analysis and computer simulations to link extreme rainfall and heat waves to global warming. The link between…
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Big History for the Era of Climate Change
Lack of understanding of environmental issues is an education problem and requires an education solution. So do we need more science education? Not necessarily, because understanding environmental issues requires some familiarity with the social sciences and humanities as well as the natural sciences; it requires a global perspective and also a sense of how the…
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MIT: U.S. Has Plenty of Room for Carbon Storage
While plenty of question marks still hang over the prospect of carbon capture and storage, MIT believes it’s ruled out one: the United States, it says, has enough capacity in its deep saline aquifers to store at least a century’s fossil fuel emissions. In the past, estimates of America’s capacity have ranged from enough to…