Focus: Climate Channel Featured Story 2

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Because of their proximity to the ocean, Californians get to enjoy locally-sourced oysters, mussels, abalone and clams.

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Earth’s oceans are home to some of the most diverse ecosystems on the planet, but warming temperatures are causing many marine animals, including coral, to die out.

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As the impacts of climate change are felt around the world, no area is experiencing more drastic changes than the northern polar region.

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Sea ice around Antarctica retreats more quickly than it advances, an asymmetry that has been a puzzle. New analysis shows that the Southern Hemisphere is following simple rules of physics, as peak midsummer sun causes rapid changes. In this aspect, it seems, it's Arctic sea ice that is more mysterious.

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A new study led by Georgia Tech points to possible help for restoring marine ecosystems — and provides more data on the role microbes play in marsh plant health and productivity.

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A first-of-its-kind study shows that some ocean animals may be able evolve their way out of troubles caused by climate change—but at a high cost. By artificially evolving 23 generations of a marine copepod, Acartia tonsa, a team of scientists at the University of Vermont found that the tiny creatures could adapt to the high temperatures and carbon dioxide levels forecast for the warming oceans. But to get there, the populations had to spend a lot of their genetic flexibility—leaving them vulnerable to new stresses, like low food.

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New analysis confirms a palpable change in fire dynamics already suspected by many.

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The boreal forest is a belt of cold-tolerant conifer trees that stretches nearly 9,000 miles across northern North American and Eurasia; it makes up almost a quarter of the Earth's forest area. It's also the coldest—and most rapidly warming—forest biome on the planet, and its shifting characteristics amid climate change are raising concerns about increased fire activity, decreased biodiversity and other long-term adverse effects for the human and natural ecosystems.

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Scientists have long hypothesized that climate change, by intensifying stressors like drought or wildfires, would make an ecosystem more vulnerable to invasive plants. Those invasive plants may in turn alter the environment in ways that amplify the impacts of climate change, explained Luke Flory, a professor of ecology in the UF/IFAS agronomy department. A new long-term field study conducted by Flory’s lab offers the first experimental evidence to support this hypothesis.

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While climate change is making much of the world warmer, temperatures in a subpolar region of the North Atlantic are getting cooler. A team of researchers report that changes in the wind pattern, among other factors, may be contributing to this “cold blob.”

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Shrubs in the desert Southwest have increased their water use efficiency at some of the highest rates ever observed to cope with a decades-long megadrought. That’s the finding of a new study from University of Utah researchers, who found that although the shrubs’ efficiency increases are unprecedented and heroic, they may not be enough to adapt to the long-term drying trend in the West.

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Increasing adoption of certain agricultural practices can help combat climate change, according to a new report by researchers from Rutgers and the University of Maine. The study explores how New Jersey’s plants and soils can help to absorb and store carbon dioxide from greenhouse gas emissions.

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An international team of researchers including faculty at Binghamton University, State University of New York will drill into the ocean floor to discover the West Antarctic Ice Sheet's sensitivity to global warming.

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Referred to as "China's Venice of the Stone Age", the Liangzhu excavation site in eastern China is considered one of the most significant testimonies of early Chinese advanced civilisation.

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In California’s Sierra Nevada, western pine beetle infestations amped up by global warming were found to kill 30% more ponderosa pine trees than the beetles do under drought alone.

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A new study from WCS and multiple partners that modeled changes in the world’s 45 different “life zones” from climate change revealed that climate impacts may soon triple over these areas if the earth continues “business-as-usual” emissions.

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The study, “U.S. Catholic bishops’ silence and denialism on climate change,” examined more than 12,000 columns published from June 2014 to June 2019 by bishops in official publications for 171 of the 178 U.S. Catholic dioceses.

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This is the result of a new study by researchers from DTU Space at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who have traced the consequences of eruptions on the Sun on clouds and Earth's energy balance.

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Quantitative empirical studies exploring how climatic and other environmental drivers influence migration are increasing year by year. PIK scientists have now reviewed methodological approaches used in the quantitative climate migration literature.

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University of Utah researchers compared every U.S. state’s CO2 emissions with their investment in the two solutions from 2009 to 2016. State governments’ policies aimed at helping consumers improve energy efficiency had no effect on CO2 emission. Investment in renewable energy sources led to more CO2 emissions in the residential sector.

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Research by scientists at Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences (SoMAS) reveals that climate velocity is affecting where large marine mammals are distributed relative to their prey species, which could have important implications for marine food web dynamics.

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The capacity of coral reefs to provide ecosystem services relied on by millions of people worldwide has declined by half since the 1950s, according to a new University of British Columbia-led study.

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Nuclear war would cause many immediate fatalities, but smoke from the resulting fires would also cause climate change lasting up to 15 years that threatens worldwide food production and human health, according to a study by researchers at Rutgers University, the National Center for Atmospheric Research and other institutions.

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The new study, published today in Global Change Biology, reveals just how dramatically climate change has impacted aquatic ecosystems in the Sierra Nevada. Scientists can use the data to anticipate changes coming in the near future, and how those changes might influence water availability.

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Some coral communities are becoming more heat tolerant as ocean temperatures rise, offering hope for corals in a changing climate.

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A research team led by Michael Biggerstaff, a professor of meteorology in the College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences at the University of Oklahoma, successfully captured data with mobile radars and other weather instruments as Hurricane Ida made landfall in Louisiana.

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Ice losses from Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica are currently responsible for roughly four percent of the global sea-level rise.

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Climate models predict that rainfall variability over wet regions globally will be greatly enhanced by global warming, causing wide swings between dry and wet conditions, according to a joint study by the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the Met Office, the UK's national meteorological service.

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A model of the eastern California forests of the Sierra Nevada looks at the longer-term future of wildfires under future climate change scenarios. Results show an initial roughly decade-long burst of wildfire activity, followed by recurring fires of decreasing area — a pattern that could apply to other drought-prone regions of the West.

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Irvine, Calif., July 22, 2021 – To meet an ambitious goal of carbon neutrality by 2045, California’s policymakers are relying in part on forests and shrublands to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, but researchers at the University of California, Irvine warn that future climate change may limit the ecosystem’s ability to perform this service.

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Wildfire smoke may greatly increase susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, according to new research from the Center for Genomic Medicine at the Desert Research Institute (DRI), Washoe County Health District (WCHD), and Renown Health (Renown) in Reno, Nev.

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Irvine, Calif., June 21, 2021 – A shift is happening in Southern California, and this time it has nothing to do with earthquakes. According to a new study by scientists at the University of California, Irvine, climate change is altering the number of plants populating the region’s deserts and mountains. Using data from the Landsat satellite mission and focusing on an area of nearly 5,000 square miles surrounding Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, the research team found that between 1984 and 2017, vegetation cover in desert ecosystems decreased overall by about 35 percent, with mountains seeing a 13 percent vegetation decline.

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Last fall, the Mullen fire west of Laramie raged for the better part of two months, burning more than 176,000 acres and 70 structures in Wyoming's Carbon and Albany counties, and in Jackson County, Colo.

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Plastic bottles drifting in the sea; bags in the stomachs of turtles; Covid-19 masks dancing in the surf: few images are as unpleasant to look at as those that show the contamination of our oceans.

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Researchers have identified the key factors that influence a vital pattern of ocean currents.

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A new study shows that emission intensity per unit of animal protein produced has decreased globally over the past two decades due to greater production efficiency, raising questions around the extent to which methane emissions will change in the future and how we can better manage their negative impacts.

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Irvine, Calif., May 5, 2021 — Intense, wide-spread melting events in Greenland, such as one in July 2012 that touched nearly every part of the massive island’s frozen slab, are catastrophic, but they still account for only a small portion of the total deterioration of the ice sheet, according to researchers at the University of California, Irvine.

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Bangladesh’s floating gardens, built to grow food during flood seasons, could offer a sustainable solution for parts of the world prone to flooding because of climate change, a new study has found.

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Where does snow come from? This may seem like a simple question to ponder as half the planet emerges from a season of watching whimsical flakes fall from the sky--and shoveling them from driveways. But a new study on how water becomes ice in slightly supercooled Arctic clouds may make you rethink the simplicity of the fluffy stuff. It describes definitive, real-world evidence for "freezing fragmentation" of drizzle as a major source of ice in slightly supercooled clouds. The findings have important implications for forecasting weather and climate.

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An unprecedented bulge of fresh water in the Arctic Ocean will travel through the Canadian Archipelago to the Labrador Sea, affecting local marine environments and global ocean circulation.

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Far underneath the ice shelves of the Antarctic, there's more life than expected, finds a recent study in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science.

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How did rocks rust on Earth and turn red? A Rutgers-led study has shed new light on the important phenomenon and will help address questions about the Late Triassic climate more than 200 million years ago, when greenhouse gas levels were high enough to be a model for what our planet may be like in the future.

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Antarctic ice is melting, contributing massive amounts of water to the world’s seas and causing them to rise – but that melt is not as linear and consistent as scientists previously thought, a new analysis of 20 years’ worth of satellite data indicates.

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Methane (CH4) is the second most important greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide (CO2).

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A first-of-its-kind, international study of 107,000 children finds that higher temperatures are an equal or even greater contributor to child malnutrition than the traditional culprits of poverty, inadequate sanitation, and poor education. The 19-nation study is the largest investigation to date of the relationship between our changing climate and children's diet diversity. Of the six regions examined--in Asia, Africa, and Central and South America--five had significant reductions in diet diversity associated with higher temperatures.

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The planet is committed to global warming in excess of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6°F) just from greenhouse gases that have already been added to the atmosphere. This is the conclusion of new research by scientists from Nanjing University, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Texas A&M University, which appears in the latest edition of Nature Climate Change.