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
Global Warming’s Worst-Case Projections Look Increasingly Likely
Global warming’s worst-case projections look increasingly likely, according to a new study that tested the predictive power of climate models against observations of how the atmosphere is actually behaving. The paper, published on Wednesday in Nature, found that global temperatures could rise …Continue reading
We’re about to kill a massive, accidental experiment in reducing global warming
Studies have found that ships have a net cooling effect on the planet, despite belching out nearly a billion tons of carbon dioxide each year. That’s almost entirely because they also emit sulfur, which can scatter sunlight in the atmosphere and form …Continue reading
Climate Change Has Made Heat Waves Much More Deadly, Mainly for the Poor
It is generally held that if we can avoid warming the planet by 2 oC above pre-industrial temperatures, we may be able to avoid the worst effects of climate change. In India, though, just a quarter of that warming has more than …Continue reading
Europe’s Blustery Weather Boosts Renewables to Record Highs
The weather hasn’t been what you’d call pleasant across Europe for the past week. Sure, the sun has shown its face a reasonable amount, but there have been rain showers and unusually high winds. Still,