Climate discussions typically center on the need to replace fossil-fuel power plants with technologies like wind turbines and solar panels. But a new paper in Science offers a stark reminder that there are still huge parts of the global energy system where …Continue reading
The daunting math of climate change means we’ll need carbon capture
At current rates of greenhouse-gas emissions, the world could lock in 1.5 ˚C of warming as soon as 2021, an analysis by the website Carbon Brief has found. We’re on track to blow the carbon budget for 2 ˚C by 2036. Amid …Continue reading
The scientist still fighting for the clean fuel the world forgot
In the closing weeks of 2008, the US Department of Energy invited politicians and press to a dedication ceremony for the Joint BioEnergy Institute in Emeryville, California. The state-of-the-art lab, backed by $125 million in federal funding, filled the top floor of …Continue reading
How to prepare cities and citizens for more killer heat waves
Heat waves are among the world’s deadliest natural disasters, killing more Americans than hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes combined. And they’re only expected to get worse, as human-caused climate change ratchets up their frequency and intensity. So what can we do to prepare …Continue reading
How nuclear weapons research revealed new climate threats
After atmospheric scientist Ivana Cvijanovic began pushing a computerized climate simulation to its limits, she noticed a disturbing result: as Arctic sea ice nearly disappeared, massive high-pressure systems built up thousands of miles away, off the west coast of the United States. …Continue reading
Missing the Paris climate target by just a little means raising the odds of extreme weather by a lot
While the lofty goal of the landmark Paris climate agreement was to prevent global temperatures from rising 2 °C, it’s increasingly unlikely the world will pull that off (see “Global warming’s worst-case projections look increasingly likely”).
The race to invent the artificial leaf
Since the early 1970s, scientists have been on a quest to develop a technology that could create liquid fuels out of carbon dioxide, water, and sunlight far more efficiently than photosynthesis, the process by which plants harness sunlight to produce carbohydrates and …Continue reading
At this rate, it’s going to take nearly 400 years to transform the energy system
Fifteen years ago, Ken Caldeira, a senior scientist at the Carnegie Institution, calculated that the world would need to add about a nuclear power plant’s worth of clean-energy capacity every day between 2000 and 2050 to avoid catastrophic climate change. Recently, he …Continue reading
What the hell is a climate model—and why does it matter?
Just a few years ago, the conventional wisdom held that you couldn’t attribute any single extreme weather event to climate change. But now scientists increasingly can and do state the odds that human actions caused or exacerbated specific droughts and hurricanes. One …Continue reading
The Year Climate Change Began to Spin Out of Control
r decades, scientists have warned that climate change would make extreme events like droughts, floods, hurricanes, and wildfires more frequent, more devastating, or both. In 2017, we got an up-close look at the raw ferocity of such an altered world as high-category …Continue reading