8 mars

Simultaneous harvest failures across major crop-producing regions are a threat to global food security. Concurrent weather extremes driven by a strongly meandering jet stream could trigger such events, but so far this has not been quantified. Specifically, the ability of state-of-the art crop and climate models to adequately reproduce such high impact events is a crucial component for estimating risks to global food security. Here we find an increased likelihood of concurrent low yields during summers featuring meandering jets in observations and models. While climate models accurately simulate atmospheric patterns, associated surface weather anomalies and negative effects on crop responses are mostly underestimated in bias-adjusted simulations. Given the identified model biases, future assessments of regional and concurrent crop losses from meandering jet states remain highly uncertain. Our results suggest that model-blind spots for such high-impact but deeply-uncertain hazards have to be anticipated and acc

Unesco joint research dating back 15 years found violence and intimidation against about 750 reporters and 44 murders

Weak government climate policies violate fundamental human rights, the European court of human rights has ruled

Dr Sarah Benn has long been concerned about the climate crisis, diligently recycling until she was “blue in the face”. But the rise of the climate activist group Extinction Rebellion in 2019 inspired her and her husband to go further. “We thought: well, if we don’t do it then who else is going to?”

Le débat sur les nouveaux OGM est biaisé par les lobbies qui défendent toute une série d’intérêts économiques. A la faveur de sa présidence européenne, la Belgique doit se positionner dans ce dossier en facilitant l’élaboration d’une politique européenne qui donne la priorité à l’équité, à l’autonomie des agriculteur.e.s, à la santé publique et à l’environnement.

Anthropogenic emissions drive global-scale warming yet the temperature increase relative to pre-industrial levels is uncertain. Using 300 years of ocean mixed-layer temperature records preserved in sclerosponge carbonate skeletons, we demonstrate that industrial-era warming began in the mid-1860s, more than 80 years earlier than instrumental sea surface temperature records. The Sr/Ca palaeothermometer was calibrated against ‘modern’ (post-1963) highly correlated (R2 = 0.91) instrumental records of global sea surface temperatures, with the pre-industrial defined by nearly constant (<±0.1 °C) temperatures from 1700 to the early 1860s. Increasing ocean and land-air temperatures overlap until the late twentieth century, when the land began warming at nearly twice the rate of the surface oceans. Hotter land temperatures, together with the earlier onset of industrial-era warming, indicate that global warming was already 1.7 ± 0.1 °C above pre-industrial levels by 2020. Our result is 0.5 °C higher than IPCC estim

Last year I was fortunate enough to be joined by four remarkable women in the British environmental movement. We were speaking at a Deep Adaptation conference in Glastonbury. The way the discussion…

Humanity faces ‘devastating domino effects’ including mass displacement and financial ruin as planet warms

Daily atmospheric carbon dioxide data from Hawaiian volcano more than double last decade’s annual average

Link to climate activism is seven times stronger for anger than it is for hope, say Norwegian researchers

Finance needs of developing countries now 10-18 times as big as international public finance flows Growing gap results from rising adaptation needs and faltering adaptation finance Failure to enhance adaptation has huge implications for losses and damages

UK has led the way, with countries across the continent making mass arrests, passing draconian new laws and labelling activists as eco-terrorists

Human activity has caused species groups to go extinct 35 times faster than they have over the past 500 years

Colombia was the deadliest country and a fifth of the 177 recorded killings took place in the Amazon rainforest, says Global Witness

Beware of these three false solutions to climate change: carbon capture utilization and storage (CCUS), hydrogen and offsets.