English references

For decades, the surface of the polar Southern Ocean (south of 50°S) has been freshening—an expected response to a warming climate. This freshening enhanced upper-ocean stratification, reducing the upward transport of subsurface heat and possibly contributing to sea ice expansion. It also limited the formation of open-ocean polynyas. Using satellite observations, we reveal a marked increase in surface salinity across the circumpolar Southern Ocean since 2015. This shift has weakened upper-ocean stratification, coinciding with a dramatic decline in Antarctic sea ice coverage. Additionally, rising salinity facilitated the reemergence of the Maud Rise polynya in the Weddell Sea, a phenomenon last observed in the mid-1970s.

SO2 declines have contributed ~25% of recent warming and driven recent acceleration. The impact of additional SO2 emissions on cloud formation diminishes as emissions increase, meaning that reductions in SO2 over areas with low background sulphate concentrations, such as the ocean, could result in a proportionately larger warming effect than in highly polluted areas, such as south Asia.

The Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) is the world's strongest ocean current and plays a disproportionate role in the climate system due to its role as a conduit for major ocean basins. This current system is linked to the ocean's vertical overturning circulation, and is thus pivotal to the uptake of heat and CO2 in the ocean. The strength of the ACC has varied substantially across warm and cold climates in Earth's past, but the exact dynamical drivers of this change remain elusive. This is in part because ocean models have historically been unable to adequately resolve the small-scale processes that control current strength. Here, we assess a global ocean model simulation which resolves such processes to diagnose the impact of changing thermal, haline and wind conditions on the strength of the ACC. Our results show that, by 2050, the strength of the ACC declines by ∼20% for a high-emissions scenario. This decline is driven by meltwater from ice shelves around Antarctica, which is exported to lower latit

Au milieu des années 1990, la population de vautours, forte de 50 millions d'individus, s'est effondrée, au point de devenir presque nulle, à cause du diclofénac, un analgésique non stéroïdien bon marché utilisé pour le bétail, mais qui est fatal aux vautours. Une nouvelle étude établit un lien entre le déclin des vautours en Inde et la propagation d'une bactérie mortelle, à l'origine de quelque 500 000 décès.

In 2023, the CO2 growth rate was 3.37 ± 0.11 ppm at Mauna Loa, 86% above the previous year, and hitting a record high since observations began in 1958[1], while global fossil fuel CO2 emissions only increased by 0.6 ± 0.5%[2,3]....

Overexploitation and habitat loss pose extinction threats for migratory fish, birds and others, worldwide

Sharp declines in critical mineral prices mask risks of future supply strains as energy transitions advance - News from the International Energy Agency

Greer’s assumption of slow collapse is built on shaky ground because industrial civilization differs from all past civilizations in four crucial ways. 

Climate change and human activities increasingly threaten lakes that store 87% of Earth’s liquid surface fresh water. Yet, recent trends and drivers of lake volume change remain largely unknown globally. Here, we analyze the 1972 largest global lakes using three decades of satellite observations, climate data, and hydrologic models, finding statistically significant storage declines for 53% of these water bodies over the period 1992–2020. The net volume loss in natural lakes is largely attributable to climate warming, increasing evaporative demand, and human water consumption, whereas sedimentation dominates storage losses in reservoirs. We estimate that roughly one-quarter of the world’s population resides in a basin of a drying lake, underscoring the necessity of incorporating climate change and sedimentation impacts into sustainable water resources management.

Since 1992, the IPCC has highlighted rising greenhouse gases, marking their ‘widespread and unprecedented’ impacts by 2014

To understand how long it will take to recover from this extinction event, a team of European scientists from Germany, Switzerland, the UK and The Netherlands decided to compare it with the previous mass extinction event, which occurred 66 million years ago when an asteroid hit our planet. This was a major event event that wiped off dinosaurs along with 75% of all species.

Don't you stumble, sometimes, into something that seems to make a lot of sense, but you can't say exactly why? For a long time, I had in mind the idea that when things start going bad, they tend to go bad fast. We might call this tendency the "Seneca effect" or the "Seneca cliff," from Lucius Annaeus Seneca who wrote that "increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid."