Although massive vegetation loss is still occurring in Asia and South America, an analysis of 20 years of satellite data has revealed that the regrowth of forests in China, Australia, and Africa mean that the total amount of vegetation globally has increased by almost 4 billion tons of carbon since 2003. The new analysis, by […]
How air pollution creates larger and longer lasting storm clouds has been a topic of intense debate in climatology circles. Now, a new investigation that finally reveals the atmospheric mechanism at work also shows how pollution plays into climate warming. Previously, scientists had thought that pollution causes larger and longer-lasting storm clouds by making thunderheads […]
A new study has revealed that our warming climate is pushing crop pests such as fungi, bacteria, viruses, insects, and nematodes, towards the North and South Poles at a rate of nearly 3 km a year. The study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, shows a strong correlation between increased global temperatures over the […]
‘ An intriguing new study that calculates the influence of cloud behavior on climate doubles the number of potentially habitable planets orbiting red dwarfs, the most common type of stars in the universe. Data from NASA’s Kepler Mission previously suggested there is approximately one Earth-size planet in the habitable zone of each red dwarf. The […]
The end-Permian mass extinction, which occurred around 250 million years ago in the pre-dinosaur era, is believed to have wiped out nearly all the world’s species. But scientists have been puzzled by the perplexingly long period – five million years – it took for new species to start appearing after the end-Permian event. Now, an […]
A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences describes alarming changes in rainfall patterns which the researchers say indicates an out-of-kilter precipitation cycle that is leading to “rain is falling in all the wrong places, for all the wrong reasons.” The study also notes how freshwater is flowing into Earth’s oceans […]
The Turkana Basin in Kenya, where the average daily temperature has been around 100 degrees for the past 4 million years, may have been the place where humans first began to walk upright. Johns Hopkins University earth scientist Benjamin Passey says that the need to stay cool may explain why pre-humans learned to walk upright, […]
Cold, dry weather has been linked to an increased incidence of prostate cancer and researchers believe that the way in which weather patterns interact withpersistent organic pollutants (POPs) may be the underlying factor. Idaho State University researcher Sophie St-Hilaire worked with colleagues to study the correlation between various weather parameters and the incidence of prostate […]
Using a new global aerosol model and two decades of meteorological data, University of Leeds climatologists have discovered a feedback effect related to the ozone hole’s closure that could actually increase warming in the southern hemisphere. The hole in the ozone layer above the Antarctic was once regarded as one of the biggest environmental threats, […]
The climate may be up to 50 percent more sensitive to atmospheric carbon dioxide in the long term than previously thought and climate projections over the next hundreds of years will likely need to be adjusted to reflect this higher sensitivity, according to a new study in Nature Geoscience. The research team, led by the […]
