Rising oceanic carbon dioxide (CO2) levels are disrupting a key brain receptor in fish, causing dramatic changes in their brain chemistry, behavior and sensory abilities, say Australian researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies. Their work appears in the journal Nature Climate Change. Around 2.3 billion tons of human CO2emissions dissolve […]
A University of Wisconsin-Madison analysis of the emissions generated from shipping freight via truck or by train shows that shipping by train delivers a big reduction in CO2 emissions. Researcher Erica Bickford said much of the environmental benefit boils down to simple efficiency. For each ton of freight they carry, trucks go about 150 miles […]
Schistocephalus solidus, a parasitic worm that infects fish, has been found to grow much more rapidly at higher temperatures, alarming scientists who warn that warming oceans could see the worm decimate fish populations. The new research into S. solidus’lifecycle has been published in the journalGlobal Change Biology. The work provides some of the first evidence […]
Previous research into dwarfism in soil dwelling organisms found that the ancient relatives of modern dung beetles and earthworms were reduced in size by as much as 50 percent during the Earth’s last warming period. Now, a new study in the journal The American Naturalist explains how a warming climate could dramatically shrink nearly all […]
Researchers from Columbia University’s Earth Institute say that El Niño, the periodic climate cycle that boosts temperatures and cuts rainfall, doubles the risk of civil wars across 90 affected tropical countries, and may account for a fifth of worldwide conflicts during the past half-century. The paper, the first to link a natural global climate cycle […]
Paleoclimate studies, where scientists look into the past to try and understand changes in Earth’s climate, may be a waste of time if astronomers are correct in their theory that relatively minor bodies like the asteroid Vesta can cause chaotic fluctuations in Earth’s orbit. NASA’s Dawn space-probe flew by Vesta last Saturday. The journal Astronomy […]
Botanists from Indiana University (IU) and Utrecht University (Netherlands) have discovered that rising carbon dioxide levels over the last 150 years have reduced the density of the pores (known as stomata) that plants use to breathe by 34 percent, dramatically lowering the amount of water vapor the plants release to the atmosphere. Writing about their […]
The first full climate simulation to make predictions out to the year 3000 indicates that even if zero CO2emissions were achieved immediately, the inertia of past carbon dioxide emissions would continue affecting the planet for the next 1000 years. Appearing in the journal Nature Geoscience, the new work is based on best-case, “zero-emissions” scenarios constructed […]
