By Jennifer Chu / MIT News Office Last August, Hurricane Irene spun through the Caribbean and parts of the eastern United States, leaving widespread wreckage in its wake. The Category 3 storm whipped up water levels, generating storm surges that swept over seawalls and flooded seaside and inland communities. Many hurricane analysts suggested, based on … Continue reading Climate change likely to increase incidence of major floods by five times or more→
By Jeremy Hance / mongabay.com Last year the Arctic, which is warming faster than anywhere else on Earth due to global climate change, experienced its warmest twelve months yet. According to recent data by NASA, average Arctic temperatures in 2011 were 2.28 degrees Celsius (4.1 degrees Fahrenheit) above those recorded from 1951-1980. As the Arctic … Continue reading 2011 warmest year on record in the Arctic; scientists warn of tipping points→
By Agence France Presse French scientists unveiling new estimates for global warming said on Thursday the 2 C (3.6 F) goal enshrined by the United Nations was “the most optimistic” scenario left for greenhouse-gas emissions. The estimates, compiled by five scientific institutes, will be handed to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for … Continue reading 2C warming now considered “optimistic” by scientists→
By Jeff Tollefson / Nature When US government scientists began sampling the air from a tower north of Denver, Colorado, they expected urban smog — but not strong whiffs of what looked like natural gas. They eventually linked the mysterious pollution to a nearby natural-gas field, and their investigation has now produced the first hard … Continue reading NOAA study: Natural gas could be as bad for climate as coal→
By Steve Connor The total volume of water that has melted from all of the world’s polar ice sheets, ice caps and mountain glaciers over the past decade would repeatedly fill Britain’s largest lake, Windemere, more than 13,000 times, according to one of the most comprehensive studies of the Earth’s frozen “cryosphere”. Using a unique … Continue reading Billions of tons of water lost from world’s glaciers, satellite reveals→
When the International Energy Agency, a conservative climate research group says we only have five years left to pull ourselves back from the brink of irreversible climate change it means one thing, Time’s Up. Yet most of us are still planning on a future that won’t exist if we don’t resist like our lives depend … Continue reading It’s Code Green, America→
The world is likely to build so many fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and inefficient buildings in the next five years that it will become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels, and the last chance of combating dangerous climate change will be “lost for ever”, according to the most thorough analysis yet of … Continue reading World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns→
By Lori Pottinger The ongoing COP17 climate meeting in Durban, South Africa is themed “saving tomorrow today.” Yet a global dam boom being promoted by dam proponents — including dozens of megadams proposed for Africa’s major rivers — could make a mockery of this vision, by endangering rivers and the ecosystems we all depend on. … Continue reading Healthy Rivers, Not Dammed Ones, Needed to Combat Climate Change→
The biodiversity loss caused by climate change will result from a combination of rising temperatures and predation — and may be more severe than currently predicted, according to a study by University of British Columbia zoologist Christopher Harley. The study, published in the current issue of the journal Science, examined the response of rocky shore … Continue reading Marine Biodiversity Loss Due to Global Warming Will Be Severe→
