Climate change and its impacts on the water cycle; how can it increase both droughts and heavy downpours?
If your tap ran dry and stores closed down, where would you get your freshwater? Water is essential to human…
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From vibrant corals to white skeletons: climate change and looming existential threats to coral reefs
Coral reefs and their ecosystems serve important roles on Earth – they flourish with biodiversity, providing habitat to 25% of…
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Sea-level rise: to mitigate or adapt? Experts say we need to do both.
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?
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How CO2 warms Earth through the greenhouse effect and why CO2 is not ‘saturated’ in Earth’s atmosphere
There is no doubt about it – climate science can be complex. But sometimes this complexity is mistaken for uncertainty.…
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Of the many factors that cause wildfires, the influence of climate change and human activities is growing
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.
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What’s in a number? The significance of the 1.5°C warming threshold and reporting on its possible breach in popular media
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. -
How much of a climate solution can technologies such as carbon capture and storage be?
Science has shown consistently that adding CO2 to the atmosphere is changing the climate in various ways, including raising the…
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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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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.”