April 20, 2020 – With the western United States and northern Mexico suffering an ever-lengthening string of dry years starting in 2000, scientists have been warning for some time that climate change may be pushing the region toward an extreme long-term drought worse than any in recorded history. A new study says the time has arrived: a […]
Earth Institute at Columbia University
Posted inEnviro
Wine-Growing Regions Could Shrink Dramatically With Climate Change
January 27, 2020 – If you were planning to drink your way through the climate apocalypse, here’s some unfortunate news: Just as climate change threatens homes, food and livelihoods, so does it threaten the world’s supply of wine. If temperatures rise by 2 degrees Celsius, the regions of the world that are suitable for growing […]
Posted inRegional
Study Bolsters Case That Climate Change Drives Many Calif. Wildfires
July 15, 2019 – Against a backdrop of long-term rises in temperature in recent decades, California has seen ever higher spikes in seasonal wildfires, and, in the last two years, a string of disastrous, record-setting blazes. This has led scientists, politicians and media to ponder: what role might warming climate be playing here? A new study […]
Posted inSci/Tech
Climate Change is Destroying a Barrier That Protects U.S. East Coast from Hurricanes
June 7, 2019 – A study suggests that climate change could soon eliminate an atmospheric barrier that protects much of the U.S. East Coast from powerful hurricanes. Severe hurricanes can cost up to hundreds of billions of dollars in damages. The destruction left in the wake of Atlantic hurricanes has been increasing over time in […]
Posted inSci/Tech
Carbon lurking in deep ocean threw ancient climate switch, say researchers
April 8, 2019 – A million years ago, a longtime pattern of alternating glaciations and warm periods dramatically changed, when ice ages suddenly became longer and more intense. Scientists have long suspected that this was connected to the slowdown of a key Atlantic Ocean current system that today once again is slowing. A new study […]
Posted inUS
Climate panel disbanded by Trump, now regrouped, releases its report
April 4, 2019 – As climate change proceeds, businesses and communities are wondering how to adapt and prepare. However, they’re finding it’s not always easy to translate broad-scale climate science into local solutions, or even to figure out which data to rely on and how to apply it. That’s why a federal advisory committee appointed […]
Posted inSci/Tech
Hurricane Maria study warns: Future climate-driven storms may raze many tropical forests
March 26, 2019 – A new study shows that damage inflicted on trees in Puerto Rico by Hurricane Maria was unprecedented in modern times, and suggests that more frequent big storms whipped up by a warming climate could permanently alter forests not only here, but across much of the Atlantic tropics. Biodiversity could suffer as result, and more carbon could be added […]
Posted inLife
Wallace Broeker, Prophet of Climate Change, Dies
Feb. 19, 2019 – Wallace Broecker, a geochemist who initiated key research into the history of earth’s climate and humans’ influence upon it, died Feb. 18 in New York. He was 87. The cause was congestive heart failure, said his family. His death was confirmed by Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, where he spent a […]
Posted inSci/Tech
The 100th meridian, where the Great Plains begin, may be shifting
April 11, 2018 – In 1878, the American geologist and explorer John Wesley Powell drew an invisible line in the dirt—a very long line. It was the 100th meridian west, the longitude he identified as the boundary between the humid eastern United States and the arid Western plains. Running south to north, the meridian cuts northward through the eastern states of Mexico, and on […]
Posted inEnviro
Swapping where crops are grown could feed an extra 825 million people
Nov. 6, 2017 – Redrawing the global map of crop distribution on existing farmland could help meet growing demand for food and biofuels in coming decades, while significantly reducing water stress in agricultural areas, according to a new study. Published today in Nature Geoscience, the study is the first to attempt to address both food production […]
Posted inSci/Tech
Climate may quickly drive forest-eating beetles north, says study
Aug. 28, 2017 – Over the next few decades, global warming-related rises in winter temperatures could significantly extend the range of the southern pine beetle–one of the world’s most aggressive tree-killing insects–through much of the northern United States and southern Canada, says a new study. The beetle’s range is sharply limited by annual extreme temperature […]
Posted inSci/Tech
At the Jersey shore, signs of a comet, and a climate crisis
Oct. 13, 2016 – In a new study, scientists say they have found evidence along the New Jersey coast that an extraterrestrial object hit the earth at the same time a mysterious release of carbon dioxide suddenly warmed the planet, some 55.6 million years ago. The warm period, known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), […]