What can explain the excess mortality in the U.S. and Europe in 2022?
image source Introduction Every day, people die of many causes: diseases, accidents, violence, or simply old age. The number of…
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Here’s what we know about how climate change impacts hurricanes – and what we don’t
The uncertainty surrounding how hurricane frequency could change as the climate warms has been brought up in claims seeking to undermine climate change’s impact on hurricanes. These claims are examples of straw man arguments: noting that climate change may not lead to a higher number of hurricanes in the future does not mean that climate change has had – or will have – no impact on hurricanes at all.
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Different parts of the planet warm more quickly than others. That doesn’t mean climate change isn’t happening.
If you’re even a casual consumer of climate news, you probably know that some parts of the globe are warming more rapidly than others. Scientists have known for years, for instance, that the Arctic is heating up at a faster clip than the global average, and recently, the region made headlines after a study showed that the northernmost reaches of our planet are warming four times faster than the rest of the Earth.
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What you need to know about the current monkeypox outbreak: transmission, symptoms, treatments, etc.
Photo by CDC/Cynthia S. Goldsmith at Public Health Image Library (PHIL) The ongoing monkeypox virus outbreak began in May 2022,…
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What do we know about the safety of titanium dioxide in menstrual hygiene products?
Photo by Josefin on Unsplash Introduction Social media posts claiming that titanium dioxide in tampons are responsible for reproductive cancers…
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What do we know about the possible link between acetaminophen use during pregnancy and autism?
Photo by Freepik Each week, approximately 23% of the adult U.S. population use a fever reducer and painkiller, such as…
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Yes, plants need carbon dioxide. No, that doesn’t mean it’s harmless.
“The benefit[s] of increasing CO2 concentrations for plant growth are increasingly being outweighed by the negative impacts, especially of global warming. This is true for natural as well as agricultural ecosystems.”
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Water scarcity in a changing climate: will drought get worse with warming?
“The thing to remember is that drought is a very complex phenomenon. For one, drought is not just precipitation. Drought is also soil moisture and streamflow. This is an important distinction, because it means that other processes that may be affected by climate change (e.g., evaporation) can play a role in increasing drought, even if precipitation does not change.”
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Assessing the effect of COVID-19 vaccines on mortality: a story of confounding factors and their role in COVID-19 misinformation
Introduction COVID-19 vaccines have been instrumental in our fight against the pandemic and our return to a normal life, thanks…
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How sea ice in the Arctic and the Antarctic is influenced by climate change
“The decreases have accelerated since the 1990s and have been part of a consistent suite of changes in the Arctic, including rising atmospheric temperatures, melting land ice, thawing permafrost, longer growing seasons, increased coastal erosion, and warming oceans. Overall, it has been a consistent picture solidly in line with the expectations of the warming climate predicted from increases in greenhouse gases. In particular, modeled sea ice predictions showed marked Arctic sea ice decreases, and the actual decreases even exceeded what the models predicted.”