Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Nearly three quarters of the global population can expect strong and rapid changes in extreme temperatures and rainfall in the next 20 years unless greenhouse gas emissions are cut dramatically, according to a new study. Led by scientists from the CICERO Center for International Climate Research and supported by the University…
Category: Earth
Study suggests US droughts, rainy extremes are becoming more severe
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Severe drought in the American Southwest and Mexico and more severe wet years in the Northeast are the modern norm in North America, according to new research—and the analysis suggests these seasonal patterns will be more extreme in the future. The middle of the United States, meanwhile, can expect bigger swings…
Study reveals shifting influence of El Niño on central Asia's rainfall
Schematic diagram illustrating underlying mechanisms of interdecadal shifts in the ENSO–SCAP relationship. Credit: npj Climate and Atmospheric Science (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41612-024-00742-x Central Asia, encompassing Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, is one of the world’s largest semi-arid to arid regions. Known for its continental climate, the region has a fragile ecosystem that is particularly sensitive…
The risk of global water scarcity is greater when accounting for the origin of rain, study shows
The relationship between the risk to water security in each hydrological basin and the governance and environmental conditions in the regions upwind. The relationship between governance (y axis), environmental performance (x axis), the level of risk to water security of each hydrological basin relative to the 379 basins used in the study (color gradient) and…
Surface energy budget analysis reveals causes of Greenland's abnormal warming
The results of the study reveal the clear-sky downwelling longwave radiation from the atmosphere and the resulting surface albedo feedback due to the melting of ice as the dominant factors for abnormal temperatures of Greenland. Credit: Professor Kyung-Ja Ha from Pusan National University, South Korea Global warming, driven by human activities, has led to rising…
New evidence supports theory that oxygen isotope ratio in seawater slowly increased over last 540 million years
Cross plot of δ18O carbonate vs δ13C carbonate of Baltica and Laurentia records. Although Baltica has lower Δ47-Temperatures than Laurentia, both have similar ranges in δ18O carbonate. Credit: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2024). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2400434121 An international team of ocean, Earth and marine scientists has found evidence supporting a theory that a…
The meaning of the Anthropocene: Why it matters even without a formal geological definition
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain For the last seven decades, Earth has been operating in unprecedented ways, leading many researchers to argue that we have entered a new geological epoch known as the Anthropocene. “While it may not have been formally accepted onto the geological time scale, the Anthropocene is real and its effects have drastically…
Hillside erosion worsening in California due to wildfires and intense rain
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Over the last three decades, California has seen increasing erosion after major wildfires—a phenomenon that not only endangers water resources and ecosystems, but is also likely to worsen with climate change, according to researchers. A new study from the U.S. Geological Survey documented a 10-fold increase in post-fire hillside erosion in…
Study finds limits to storing CO₂ underground to combat climate change
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Imperial College London research has found limits to how quickly we can scale up technology to store gigatonnes of carbon dioxide under Earth’s surface. Current international scenarios for limiting global warming to less than 1.5 degrees by the end of the century rely on technologies that remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from…
Using AI to link heat waves to global warming
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Researchers at Stanford and Colorado State University have developed a rapid, low-cost approach for studying how individual extreme weather events have been affected by global warming. Their method, detailed on Aug. 21 in Science Advances, uses machine learning to determine how much global warming has contributed to heat waves in the…