It is not just the extreme cold that birds have had to cope with in recent British winters, scientists have found, but the unpredictability with which the weather often now changes.
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Increasingly common false spring events are leaving crops and wild plants vulnerable to subsequent freezes, creating a cascade of consequences for ecosystems. The spring of 2012 was the earliest recorded across the United States since 1900.
The world faces a serious water crisis, warned former heads of government and experts recently in a book that identifies a multitude of associated security, development and social risks, including food, health, energy and equity issues.
Research from the Arctic shows Greenland’s fastest-flowing glacier has doubled its summer flow pace in a decade, and ice cover on Alaskan lakes is declining.
The question of how global warming will influence El Niño has been a challenging one for scientists to answer. A new study suggests while the overall number of El Niños is unlikely to increase, particularly strong “super” El Niños are likely to occur twice as frequently in a warming world.
A wildfire exploded outside Los Angeles Thursday as record temperatures spread across California, where drought conditions are escalating as the state comes off its driest year on record.A new update to the U.S. Drought Monitor shows that severe drought, the second-worst drought category, has spread across 62.7 percent of the California as of Tuesday.
East African Agriculture and Climate Change, published by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), looks at threats to food supplies in 11 countries in East and Central Africa – Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Rwanda, Sudan, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda.
The U.S. may just be climbing out of the freezer, but Australia has been sweating through a major heat wave to start the year. Heat records fell across a large part of the country in the first week of the New Year. The warm weather is currently centered over sparsely populated Western Australia, but it could hit major population centers along the east coast by late next week.
Local legend has it that the Atlantic Ocean begins here, where the Ashley and Cooper rivers come together to form Charleston harbor, overlooked by a city skyline dotted with church steeples and stately old homes.
A warming world carries many threats, and now scientists have discovered that a change in atmospheric conditions could have serious consequences for soil chemistry
Ireland is famous for its literature and singing and dancing, its pubs and ready humour, its rugged scenery and green fields – and its rain. But climate change could lead to a different-looking Ireland in future. Summer visitors to Ireland used to coping with frequent outpourings from the heavens might be in for a bit of a shock in future if the latest projections on the country’s climate by Met ?ireann, the Irish Meteorological Service, prove correct.
- By Chris Rapley
Professor Chris Rapley is a former director of both the British Antarctic Survey and the Science Museum in London. What the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, AR5, says about the oceans alarms him. The messages are ever clearer: climate change is real, we humans are the driver, and we need to act resolutely and soon to reduce the risk of serious disruption.
Winter may just be ending in Australia, but temperatures are already summerlike. September was one for the record books, with hot temperatures that baked the country from the outback to the coasts and made this the hottest September in the country’s 104 years of record-keeping.
New data visualizations from the NASA Center for Climate Simulation and NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio show how climate models - those used in the new report from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - estimate how temperature and precipitation patterns could change throughout the 21st century.
Researchers in the US say that millions of lives could be saved by the end of the century if greenhouse gas emissions were reduced. If the world does take concerted action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, then by 2100 between 1.4 million and three million people a year will be conspicuously better off: they won’t be dead.
The extent of sea ice in the Arctic appears to have reached its lowest point for 2013 – more than last year, but well below the long term average.Scientists say the sea ice which covers much of the Arctic Ocean appears to have reached its minimum extent for this year.
With our country facing tough choices about Syria, Moyers & Company’s John Light had a great piece on Friday: “Drought Helped Spark Syria’s Civil War — Is it One of Many Climate Wars to Come?” He interviewed one of our favorites, Francesco Femia, co-founder of the Center for Climate and Security, which has an advisory board of retired military commanders and foreign-policy experts.
The forest fires raging through states in the western US are among the worst on record, but latest research indicates that they will get even worse in future as temperatures rise. As fire crews battle to control the forest fires that have been devastating areas of the western US.
Climate change is only one of the risks that coral larvae have to face – but those which do survive its effects can improve the prospects for mature reefs. Scientists in the UK and the US have found that coral larvae are capable of travelling very long distances before becoming part of a reef.
Recent research suggests that the rise and fall of the ancient world’s civilisations may have been due to a changing climate. Historians and archaeologists have invoked catastrophic volcanic eruption, a tsunami, invasion, a socioeconomic crisis, new technology and mysterious forces to explain the collapse of late Bronze Age civilisation in Europe.
Scientists in the UK say the steady advance in the arrival of spring each year may mean that some butterfly species which develop early will simply be unable to adapt any further. British researchers are using insect specimens kept in museums for a century and a quarter to learn more about climate change and the steady move towards the earlier annual arrival of spring.
European climate scientists say the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere mean it is virtually inevitable that far more parts of the world will experience more frequent and severe heat waves in the next 30 years. Stand by for extreme weather.
We sometimes forget that one consequence of climate change is likely to be new ways for diseases to spread. But the natural world offers stark reminders. Some like it hot: more protozoans can infect the monarch butterfly as climates become milder; nematode parasites get two chances to infect caribou and reindeer as a result of Arctic warming; and coral pathogens become more active with warmer seas.