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From vibrant corals to white skeletons: climate change and looming existential threats to coral reefs
Coral reefs and their ecosystem serve important roles on Earth – they flourish with biodiversity, offering habitat to 25% of…
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Coral reefs and their ecosystem serve important roles on Earth – they flourish with biodiversity, offering habitat to 25% of…
Roughly 900 million people lived in low-lying coastal cities and settlements in 2020; a figure that is projected to reach 1 billion by 2050. Is there anything we can do now to reduce sea-level rise and its impacts? Our past actions will already impact sea-levels for thousands of years. But not everything is set in stone. We possess the power to reduce sea-level rise and its impacts over the next century and beyond with our current actions. Some advocate to mitigate the causes, and others to adapt to the consequences. But what do experts say?
There is no doubt about it – climate science can be complex. But sometimes this complexity is mistaken for uncertainty.…
Although there are multiple things at play when it comes to wildfires, climate change is becoming increasingly important. Wildfires are the result of complex interactions between biophysical and human factors, and it only takes one poorly managed campfire to cause a serious, widespread wildfire disaster. Many wildfires are indeed the direct result of human activities. However, many more and much worse wildfires are now possible because of climate change, leading to greater environmental and economic negative impacts.
These findings were widely covered by popular media outlets, including in articles published by The Guardian, CNN, and BBC, which all reported that this temperature increase would represent a breach of the key IPCC threshold. However, this is missing some important context.
“A single year above 1.5°C does not mean the world has passed that particular warming level”, said Zeke Hausfather. Such nuance was better captured by articles published in Reuters and Axios, which both correctly did not report that these new temperature projections, if realized, would constitute a breach of the threshold.
Science has shown consistently that adding CO2 to the atmosphere is changing the climate in various ways, including raising the…
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.
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.
“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.”
“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.”