A multi-national team of scientists (China, USA, New Zealand, Italy, and France) analyze the temperature of the Earth annually.
The Gulf Stream is intrinsic to the global climate system, bringing warm waters from the Caribbean up the East Coast of the United States. As it flows along the coast and then across the Atlantic Ocean, this powerful ocean current influences weather patterns and storms, and it carries heat from the tropics to higher latitudes as part of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. A new study published today in Nature Climate Change now documents that over the past 20 years, the Gulf Stream has warmed faster than the global ocean as a whole and has shifted towards the coast. The study, led by Robert Todd, a physical oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), relies on over 25,000 temperature and salinity profiles collected between 2001 and 2023.
A large portion of Greenland was an ice-free tundra landscape—perhaps covered by trees and roaming woolly mammoths—in the recent geologic past (about 416,000 years ago).
A new study by a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientist and collaborators shows that nearly all the recent increase in summer wildfire burned area in California is attributable to human-caused (anthropogenic) climate change. Anthropogenic simulations yielded burn areas an average of 172% higher than natural variation simulations.
Sixty per cent of the world's fresh water is bound up in Antarctic ice sheets. Thirty million cubic kilometres of ice is perhaps a difficult number to grasp.
56 million years ago, the Earth experienced one of the largest and most rapid climate warming events in its history: the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), which has similarities to current and future warming.
Study suggests some plants are responding unexpectedly quickly to climate change – often outpacing animals’ adaptations.
Climate change researchers from the University of Delaware are among those in Antarctica conducting fieldwork on penguins, ocean currents and glaciers
Human-released greenhouse gasses are causing the world to warm, and with that warming comes increasing stress for many of the planet’s plants and animals.
Greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere from electronic devices and their associated electronic waste increased by 53 percent between 2014 and 2020, including 580 metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2020 alone, according to University of California, Irvine researchers.
By the end of this century, permafrost in the rapidly warming Arctic will likely emit as much carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere as a large industrial nation, and potentially more than the U.S. has emitted since the start of the industrial revolution.
Researchers assess the dire consequences of climate change under a business-as-usual scenario.
As more frequent and intense heat waves expose animals to temperatures outside of their normal limits, an international team led by researchers at the University of Bristol studied over 100 species of insect to better understand how these changes will likely affect them.
Conservation of CO2 stocks in the biome is highly affected by forest degradation, which could lead to at least 30% higher emissions than those produced by climate change.
Along with implications for the future, the findings illuminate important moments in our past, including human migration into the Americas, the variable human use of coastal and interior habitats and the extinction of the flightless duck Chendytes.
A national survey of close to 1000 adults in Greenland (where approximately 90% of the population is Indigenous) conducted by a McGill University-led research team has found that a surprisingly large majority – 3 out of 4 Greenlanders – support extracting and exporting sand left by the melting ice sheet.
In an effort to understand how climate changes will affect many species at once, PhD candidate Guillermo Garcia Costoya created simulations that can predict how likely animals are to go extinct in different climatic conditions.
The work, which was conducted over a 15-year period (2005-2019) through a partnership between scientists from the UPV/EHU and the Centre d'Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Évolutive in Montpellier (CEFE-CNRS), focused on two populations of blue tits in the south of France, one located on the outskirts of Montpellier and the other in the northwest of the island of Corsica.
July 19 was the hottest day ever recorded in the United Kingdom, with temperatures surpassing 40 degrees Celsius (about 104 degrees Fahrenheit). The heatwave serves as an early preview of what climate forecasters theorized will be typical summer weather in the U.K. in 2050.
An international team of scientists led by researchers from the University of Adelaide has revealed that rates of future warming threaten marine life in more than 70 per cent of the most biodiverse-rich areas of Earth’s oceans.
The State of California is banking on its forests to help reduce planet-warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But that element of the state’s climate-change solution arsenal may be in jeopardy, as new research from the University of California, Irvine reports that trees in California’s mountain ranges and open spaces are dying from wildfires and other pressures – and fewer new trees are filling the void.
Roasting green chile is a cultural touchstone in New Mexico, but burning propane to roast the peppers leads to a seasonal emission of approximately 7,800 metric tons of carbon dioxide — the equivalent of driving 1,700 cars for a year.
Over a 30-year period, endangered African wild dogs shifted their average birthing dates later by 22 days, which allowed them to match the birth of new litters with the coolest temperatures in early winter. But as a result, temperatures increased during the critical, post-birth "denning period," which fewer pups survived.
University of Miami associate professor Kenneth Feeley conducted a lengthy study on forests in Jamaica and learned that hurricanes can magnify the effects of climate change, allowing species from warmer climates to replace those that prefer cooler temperatures.
Instead of focusing on carbon dioxide's effect on future temperature, new research includes the related human-generated emissions of methane, nitrogen oxide and particle pollution. Expanding the scope increases the amount of future warming that is already guaranteed by past emissions, and shortens the timeline to reach the Paris Agreement temperature targets.
To prevent the worst outcomes from climate change, the U.S. will need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50% in the next eight years. Scientists from around the nation have developed a blueprint for success.
A new study has revealed the most intense heatwaves ever across the world – and remarkably some of these went almost unnoticed decades ago.
A new study, “Global field observations of tree die-off reveal hotter-drought fingerprint for Earth’s forests,” compiled a global database of the published locations of climate-induced forest die-off events, from 1970-2018, across 675 locations. After analyzing the climate conditions at each location during each event, researchers found a common ‘hotter-drought fingerprint’ for Earth’s forests, a term that describes the combination of higher temperatures and more frequent droughts for a lethal set of climate conditions.
The Arctic is warming along with the rest of the planet, and as this is happening, its permafrost – perennially frozen arctic soil that holds a lot of trapped organic matter from dead plants – is thawing. As the permafrost thaws, the organic matter it holds is thawing, too, and this is opening the door for microorganisms to decompose that matter and, in the process, release climate-warming greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere.
Climate change could result in the financial toll of flooding rising by more than a quarter in the United States by 2050 – and disadvantaged communities will bear the biggest brunt, according to new research.
A multi-institution research team has discovered a catalyst that converts methane, the primary component of natural gas and a major greenhouse gas, into ethane and ethylene that can be turned into plastics and resins.
Global Temperature Report: November 2021
Changes in the northern Alaskan Arctic ocean environment have reached a point at which a previously rare phenomenon—widespread blooms of toxic algae—could become more commonplace, potentially threatening a wide range of marine wildlife and the people who rely on local marine resources for food. That is the conclusion of a new study about harmful algal blooms (HABs) of the toxic algae Alexandrium catenella being published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
A study recently published in Nature Communications suggests that displacing cold-water communities of algae with warm-adapted ones threatens to destabilize the delicate marine food web. The team was led by University of East Anglia researchers and included DOE Joint Genome Institute researchers.
Greenland may be best known for its enormous continental scale ice sheet that soars up to 3,000 meters above sea level, whose rapid melting is a leading contributor to global sea level rise.
A new study predicts that any sea level rise in the world’s most southern continent will be countered by an increase in snowfall, associated with a warmer Polar atmosphere. Using modern methods to calculate projected changes to sea levels, researchers discovered that the two ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica respond differently, reflecting their very distinct local climates.
Seeing the urgent need for change, a team of scientists from leading research universities, conservation organizations and government laboratories across the West has produced a synthesis of the scientific literature that clearly lays out the established science and strength of evidence on climate change, wildfire and forest management for seasonally dry forests. The goal is to give land managers and others across the West access to a unified resource that summarizes the best-available science so they can make decisions about how to manage their landscapes.
Woods Hole, MA (August 3, 2021) – A new study published today in Global Change Biology provides valuable new data that highlights how species extinction risk is accelerating due to rapid climate change and an increase in extreme climate events, such as glacial calving and sea ice loss. The study, led by Stephanie Jenouvrier, associate scientist, and seabird ecologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and co-authored by an international team of scientists, policy experts, ecologists, and climate scientists, provided pivotal research and projections tailored for use by the U.S Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS). Their work proposed that emperor penguins be listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act and this week, USFWS submitted that listing proposal.
Twenty months after more than 11,000 scientists declared a global climate emergency, establishing a set of benchmarks for the planet’s health, an international coalition says its update on those vital signs “largely reflect the consequences of an unrelenting ‘business as usual’ approach to climate change policy”.
Rising greenhouse gases and declining aerosols have triggered an approximate four-day delay in rainfall over tropical land and the Sahel.
Oxygen levels in the world’s temperate freshwater lakes are declining rapidly — faster than in the oceans — a trend driven largely by climate change that threatens freshwater biodiversity and drinking water quality.
New research from Florida State University shows that concentrations of the toxic element mercury in rivers and fjords connected to the Greenland Ice Sheet are comparable to rivers in industrial China, an unexpected finding that is raising questions about the effects of glacial melting in an area that is a major exporter of seafood.
New research by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) climate scientists and collaborators shows that satellite measurements of the temperature of the troposphere (the lowest region of the atmosphere) may have underestimated global warming over the last 40 years.
New research led by Aalto University assesses just how global food production will be affected if greenhouse gas emissions are left uncut. The study is published in the prestigious journal One Earth on Friday 14 May.
A new analysis of satellite cloud observations finds that global warming causes low-level clouds over the oceans to decrease, leading to further warming. The work, led by researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), in collaboration with colleagues from Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the NASA Langley Research Center.
Australia's 'black summer' of bushfires was depicted on the front pages of the world's media with images of wildlife and habitat destruction, caused by climate change, while in Australia the toll on ordinary people remained the visual front-page focus.
The Antarctic ice sheet is much less likely to become unstable and cause dramatic sea-level rise in upcoming centuries if the world follows policies that keep global warming below a key 2015 Paris climate agreement target, according to a Rutgers coauthored study. But if global warming exceeds the target – 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) – the risk of ice shelves around the ice sheet’s perimeter melting would increase significantly, and their collapse would trigger rapid Antarctic melting. That would result in at least 0.07 inches of global average sea-level rise a year in 2060 and beyond, according to the study in the journal Nature.
Irvine, Calif., April 22, 2021 — California’s wildfire problem, fueled by a concurrence of climate change and a heightened risk of human-caused ignitions in once uninhabited areas, has been getting worse with each passing year of the 21st century. Researchers in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Irvine have conducted a thorough analysis of California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection wildfire statistics from 2000 to 2019, comparing them with data from 1920 to 1999.
Should humans use technology to put the brakes on global warming? Stratospheric aerosol intervention (SAI) is a climate intervention that has been studied as a way to help cool the Earth. But what would be the consequences to natural systems of SAI? This question is being examined by a large scientific research team.
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