Brazilian scientists have identified a new way to take the rain out of the rainforest. All the world has to do is to make sure more carbon dioxide reaches the trees − half as much again as today. The effect will be stark: it will be roughly the same as if Brazil’s business leaders, politicians and […]
Tim Radford, Climate News Network
Posted inEnviro
Melting tropical glaciers sound an early warning
The world’s remotest water towers are in retreat. The snows of Kilimanjaro in Africa are diminishing: between 1986 and 2017 the area of ice that crowns the most famous mountain in Tanzania has decreased by 71%. A tropical glacier near Puncak Jaya in Papua in Indonesia has lost 93% of its ice in the 38 years from 1980 […]
Posted inEnviro
The very expensive human cost of climate change
LONDON, May 25, 2021 − We know already that the human cost of climate change is immense. Now we can put a figure on it. Nine years on, New Yorkers have a clearer idea of the direct cost of human-driven climate change to them during just one stormy weekend in October 2012. They became poorer by […]
Posted inEnviro
Only intact forests can stave off climate change
LONDON, May 3, 2021 – In the last decade, the Amazon forests of Brazil released more carbon into the atmosphere than they absorbed, thanks largely to human activities that cleared or degraded the canopy. Those activities make it impossible for affected forests to stave off climate change. And a survey of the cooler forests of North […]
Posted inCalifornia
Poorest people will suffer worst from cities’ heat
LONDON, March 13, 2021 − As the summer thermometer soars, and the cities of the US Southwest are caught up in extremes of heat, the poorest people who live in the least prosperous districts may find their streets as much as 3°C hotter than those of the wealthiest 10%. And in Los Angeles, one of the richest […]
Posted inEnviro
Fire and flood menace parts of US and Bangladesh
LONDON, December 14, 2020 − More extreme weather is on the way for the hapless residents of Bangladesh, New York and the western US, facing the prospect of worsening fire and flood. There is a new future for New York. By the close of the century, thanks to sea level rise and global heating, parts of it […]
Posted inWorld
More avoidable pandemics await a heedless world
LONDON, November 11, 2020 − Once again, naturalists have warned that the invasion of wilderness can seriously damage human health: avoidable pandemics − Covid-19 is an instance of a disease transferred from wild mammals to humans − threaten to arrive more often, spread more rapidly, do more damage to the global economy, and kill more people. That’s because […]
Posted inWorld
Fire and drought could trigger Amazon collapse
LONDON, September 30, 2020 – Within one human lifetime, Amazon collapse could have turned the rainforest into open savannah. The combined devastation of human-induced global warming, rapidly increasing degradation or destruction of the forest, natural climate cycles and catastrophic wildfires could be enough to bring the world’s biggest, richest and most vital forest to a tipping point: […]
Posted inUS
Lethal price of climate inertia far exceeds action
September 15, 2020 – In the hotter world of climate change, it won’t just be the glaciers that melt: national and regional economies, big business, government and even the multinationals will all pay a lethal price. If the planet becomes 4°C warmer by 2100, then many regions could see a 10% fall in economic output. They’d […]
Posted inEnviro
Food shortage may finish polar bears by 2100
LONDON, July 24, 2020 − As the Arctic sea ice dwindles, so will hope for the region’s most dramatic predator, its polar bears. A creature fashioned by evolution to fast a whole summer and gorge through the autumn and winter may not last, as the ice melts ever earlier and forms ever later. That is because Ursus maritimus can […]
Posted inEnviro
Arctic Ocean is set for more turbulent future
LONDON, July 20, 2020 − The Arctic Ocean is changing, and changing fast. By the century’s end, the maximum height of storm waves in the polar seas could have risen by twice or even three times the present height. According to new research, wave heights could increase by two metres and coastal floods could become four times, […]
Posted inEnviro
Antarctic melting could bring a much hotter future
LONDON, June 23, 2020 – Antarctic melting starts with dramatic speed. Ice shelves during the sudden warm spell at the close of the last Ice Age retreated at up to 50 metres a day. This finding is not based on climate simulations generated by computer algorithms. It is based on direct evidence left 12,000 years ago on the […]
Posted inEnviro
Increasingly arid future faces the American West
LONDON, May 26, 2020 – The great American West is becoming inexorably more parched, with an inescapably arid future ahead. The winter snows will be lighter, and the spring melt much earlier. The river flows will slow, in some cases to a trickle, trees will die, and catastrophic wildfires will become more frequent. Agricultural harvests will be […]
Posted inEnviro
Humans are set to hijack the fossil record
LONDON, Jan. 3, 2020 – US scientists have made a prediction that some yet-to-evolve intelligent species a hundred million years into the future can test. One day the fossil record will be more than usually rich in the complete skeletons of a small number of creatures: pigs, sheep, cattle and humans, many of the last […]
Posted inEnviro
Worse US Atlantic floods need planned retreat
LONDON, Sept. 3, 2019 – What are now considered once-in-a-hundred-years floods are on the increase in the US. Later this century, they could happen to northern coastal states every year. And even in the more fortunate cities along the south-east Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico coasts, the once-in-a-century floods will happen a lot more […]
Posted inUS
Today’s unique climate change has no natural cause, no historic precedent
LONDON, Aug. 19, 2019 – European and US scientists have cleared up a point that has been nagging away at climate science for decades: not only is the planet warming faster than at any time in the last 2,000 years, but this unique climate change really does have neither a historic precedent nor a natural […]
Posted inEnviro
Elephants’ diets help forests to thrive
LONDON, July 30, 2019 – Like humans, all social animals exploit, disturb and alter their natural environment. Biologists have just identified at least one species, elephants, that – in the course of bulldozing their way through the undergrowth and destroying young trees – actually make the forest more efficient at storing carbon and thus containing […]
Posted inUS
Paris treaty would cut US heat peril
LONDON, June 18, 2019 − British scientists have identified a way in which President Trump could save thousands of American lives from the US heat peril. All he needs to do is honour the Paris Agreement of 2015 to keep global warming to “well below” 2°C above the planetary average that has endured for most […]
Posted inWorld
CO2 levels pass 3-million-year record
LONDON, April 8, 2019 – German scientists have confirmed, once again, that carbon dioxide is reaching concentrations unprecedented on any human time scale, with CO2 levels in the atmosphere already higher than they have been for at least three million years. And their computer simulations – backed up by analysis of ocean sediments that tell […]
Posted inEnviro
Climate change stokes mayhem in several ways
LONDON, Feb. 22, 2019 – Stand by for long hot summers marked by riot and racial tension. As climate change stokes mayhem, global warming is likely to see a direct rise in human irritability. Climate change accompanied by natural disaster such as flood or drought could lead to harvest failure and food and water shortages […]