The study indicates that under the frigid weight of Barents Sea Ice sheet, which covered northern Eurasia some 22 000 years ago, significant amounts of methane may have been stored as hydrates in the ground. As the ice sheet retreated, the methane rich hydrates melted, releasing the climate gas into the ocean and atmosphere for…
As someone who follows the climate topic for several years, I’ve to conclude that we are still far away from taking climate change seriously. Around 10 years ago there were rather minor groups of concerned scientists and bloggers, while the media was giving “a balanced view” to the so called deniersphere. This went on for…
The Arctic is on the front lines of global climate change, warming more than twice as fast as lower latitudes. Now in its 10th year, the Arctic Report Card provides the latest Arctic observations from an international team of more than 70 scientists in 10 countries about changes in Arctic air and sea temperatures, snow,…
The unfolding 2015-16 El Niño event is already the strongest the world has seen since 1997-98, and people all over the world are feeling or are expected to feel its impact in a variety of ways. Scientists from NASA and NOAA will present findings on El Niño’s global reach as seen from the vantage point…
Globally, heat kills more people than any other weather-related event. With temperatures and humidity expected to increase in the coming decades, heat stress is projected to have increasingly severe impacts on many regions of the world. Here, researchers estimate the global exposure to fatal heat stress throughout the 21st century and its effects on human…
Recent Changes in Blocking Characteristics Assessed Using Self-Organizing Maps Speaker: Jennifer Ann Francis Blocking anticyclones are known to be associated with persistent weather patterns that often lead to extreme weather events. An outstanding question, however, is whether the frequency and/or intensity of these dynamical features are changing in response to human-caused climate change, and in…
Here we look at the current weather configuration in the Northern Hemisphere, with the scope on the mild 2015 winter weather in what seems to affect many regions in northern latitudes this winter. The atmosphere in many northern regions like Canada (Northern America) or Europe is currently dominated by westerly jet stream winds. This configuration has…
EurekAlert (Release): Falling oxygen levels caused by global warming could be a greater threat to the survival of life on planet Earth than flooding, according to researchers from the University of Leicester. A study led by Sergei Petrovskii, Professor in Applied Mathematics from the University of Leicester’s Department of Mathematics, has shown that an increase in…
We hear all the time that we need to stop the planet from warming an additional two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Why is that specific number so important though? And what happens if we exceed that limit? William Brangham offers some background on that climate science target.