2022
As Nobel laureate Solow said to Congress when criticizingeconomicmodelsforfailingtoanticipatethe“GreatReces-sion,” “Every proposition has to pass a smell test: Does itreally make sense?” (2). The methods and conclusions inDietzetal.(1)donotmakesense. ...
A study of healthy volunteers found that the combination of heat and humidity gets dangerous faster than many people realize
Long before the current political divide over climate change, and even before the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865), an American scientist named Eunice Foote documented the underlying cause of today’s climate change crisis. The year was 1856. Foote’s brief scientific paper was the first to describe the extraordinary power of carbon dioxide gas to absorb heat – the driving force of global warming. Carbon dioxide is an odorless, tasteless, transparent gas that forms when people burn fuels, including coal, oil, gasoline and wood.
Un ensemble de mesures de terrain effectuées au Svalbard, un archipel norvégien situé dans le détroit de Fram, montrent qu’un nouveau puits de carbone est probablement en train de se mettre en place dans le Grand Nord. Ces résultats ont récemment été publiés dans la revue Scientific Reports.
We submit that the safe operating space of the planetary boundary of novel entities is exceeded since annual production and releases are increasing at a pace that outstrips the global capacity for assessment and monitoring. The novel entities boundary in the planetary boundaries framework refers to entities that are novel in a geological sense and that could have large-scale impacts that threaten the integrity of Earth system processes. We review the scientific literature relevant to quantifying the boundary for novel entities and highlight plastic pollution as a particular aspect of high concern. An impact pathway from production of novel entities to impacts on Earth system processes is presented.
2021
In het vlijmscherpe essay ‘Consumeren als konijnen’ veegt Soumaya Majdoub (VUB) de hardnekkige mythe van de aardbol dat overbevolking de motor van de klimaatverstoring is. Green Growth en geboortebeperking zijn slechts schijnoplossingen, gestoeld op verkeerde veronderstellingen en bangmakerij.
Habitat degradation, low genetic variation and declining fertility are setting Homo sapiens up for collapse
In Paris, all governments solemnly promised to come to COP26 with more ambitious 2030 commitments to close the massive 2030 emissions gap that was already evident in 2015. Three years later the IPCC Special Report on 1.5°C reinforced the scientific imperative, and earlier this year it called a climate “code red.” Now, at the midpoint of Glasgow, it is clear there is a massive credibility, action and commitment gap that casts a long and dark shadow of doubt over the net zero goals put forward by more than 140 countries, covering 90% of global emissions.
In the Paris Agreement, over 200 countries decided upon limiting global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius. Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxembourg ratified the agreement and consecutively, in November 2018, they signed the Benelux Talanoa Declaration, emphasizing their common pathway in achieving these goals. In addition, the Benelux Talanoa Declaration calls upon the creation of a platform to enhance further dialogue between the Benelux countries, as well as with stakeholders committed and working towards to the climate objectives on a policy, technical, scientific, practical or more conceptual level.
The scientific consensus that humans are altering the climate has passed 99.9%, according to research that strengthens the case for global action at the Cop26 summit in Glasgow.
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Remarkably there are still some who, despite years of accumulating scientific evidence and a summer of extraordinary extreme weather events, continue to deny the reality of climate change or the role of humans in causing it. Thankfully their number no longer includes any of the world’s governments.
Human activity is changing the climate in unprecedented and sometimes irreversible ways, a major UN scientific report has said. The landmark study warns of increasingly extreme heatwaves, droughts and flooding, and a key temperature limit being broken in just over a decade. The report "is a code red for humanity", says the UN chief.
The Atlantic Ocean's current system, an engine of the Northern Hemsiphere's climate, could be weakening to such an extent that it could soon bring big changes to the world's weather, a scientific study said on Thursday.
Every metric ton of carbon dioxide humans emit comes at a cost—not only in terms of the financial toll of the damage wrought by floods, heat waves and droughts but also the price in human lives. Substantially curtailing emissions today could prevent tens of millions of premature deaths over the course of the 21st century, according to a new study that calculated this “mortality cost of carbon.”
Whenever an extreme weather or climate-related event occurs, the media and decision-makers ask the question to what extent it is influenced by climate change. For a few years now the scientific community has been able to answer that question for relatively simple extremes: hot and cold extremes, extreme precipitation and drought. This emerging field of climate science is called Extreme Event Attribution ...
Experts say scientific advances are making it easier to attribute the damages of climate breakdown to companies’ activities. Businesses could soon be facing a fresh wave of legal action holding them to account for their greenhouse gas emissions, owing to advances in climate science, experts have warned.
Even “sustainable” technologies such as electric vehicles and wind turbines face unbreachable physical limits and exact grave environmental costs
In December 2020, 50 of the world’s leading biodiversity and climate experts, selected by a 12-person Scientific Steering Committee assembled by IPBES and IPCC, participated in a four-day virtual workshop to examine the synergies and trade-offs between biodiversity protection and climate change mitigation and adaptation.
Given the circumstances, Scientific American has agreed with major news outlets worldwide to start using the term “climate emergency” in its coverage of climate change. Journalism should reflect what science says: the climate emergency is here.
The war of disinformation against climate science is now essentially over. The scientific evidence has become impossible to dispute in light of the dramatic increases in extreme weather events, megafires in recent years. The deniers have not given up the battle, They have merely changed their tactics, Michael Mann contends in his book The New Climate War...
2020
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Scientists just completed one of the most comprehensive investigations of Earth’s climate history—and the findings aren’t favorable. They found that the planet could eventually warm to levels it hasn’t reached in at least 34 million years.
An extensive new multi-proxy database of paleo-temperature time series (Temperature 12k) enables a more robust analysis of global mean surface temperature (GMST) and associated uncertainties than was previously available. We applied five different statistical methods to reconstruct the GMST of the past 12,000 years (Holocene). Each method used different approaches to averaging the globally distributed time series and to characterizing various sources of uncertainty, including proxy temperature, chronology and methodological choices. The results were aggregated to generate a multi-method ensemble of plausible GMST and latitudinal-zone temperature reconstructions with a realistic range of uncertainties. The warmest 200-year-long interval took place around 6500 years ago when GMST was 0.7 °C (0.3, 1.8) warmer than the 19th Century (median, 5th, 95th percentiles). Following the Holocene global thermal maximum, GMST cooled at an average rate −0.08 °C per 1000 years (−0.24, −0.05). The multi-method ensembles and th
Only a decade or two ago it was widely thought that tropical forests and intact natural environments teeming with exotic wildlife threatened humans by harboring the viruses and pathogens that lead to new diseases in humans like Ebola, HIV and dengue. But a number of researchers today think that it is actually humanity’s destruction of biodiversity that creates the conditions for new viruses and diseases like COVID-19, the viral disease that emerged in China in December 2019,
2014
Generating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years, and if current rates of degradation continue all of the world's top soil could be gone within 60 years, a senior UN official said