Category Archives: Climate Change

Extinctions related to climate change have already happened in hundreds of plant and animal species around the world. New research, publishing on December 8th in the open-access journal PLOS Biology, shows that local extinctions have already occurred in 47% of the 976 plant and animal species studied. Climate change is predicted to threaten many species…

In a new paper, published in Scientific Reports, an international team of researchers has analysed fossils and DNA from living and recently extinct species to show that conservation sensitive Australasian marsupials are much older than previously thought. "We used bandicoots as a model to examine the radiation of marsupials relative to climate change through time.…

It’s a myth there are no big winners from climate change besides fossil fuel companies. According to one study, global warming is doubling bark beetle mating, triggering up to 60 times as many beetles attacking trees every year. The decline in creatures with shells thanks to ocean acidification “could trigger an explosion in jellyfish populations.”…

Human activities, such as greenhouse gas emissions and land use, influenced specific extreme weather and climate events in 2014, including tropical cyclones in the central Pacific, heavy rainfall in Europe, drought in East Africa, and stifling heat waves in Australia, Asia, and South America, according to a new report released today. The report, "Explaining Extreme…

Every fall when the king tides roll in, the most obvious sign of climate change asserts itself in South Florida: flooding everywhere, from submerged roads in Miami to waves washing across neighborhoods in the Keys to swamped docks and yards in Fort Lauderdale’s canal-side homes. But beyond the flooding, a more insidious problem is at…

Researchers from the University of California, Irvine and NASA have uncovered a remarkably strong link between high wildfire risk in the Amazon basin and the devastating hurricanes that ravage North Atlantic shorelines. The climate scientists' findings appear in the journal Geophysical Research Letters near the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's calamitous August 2005 landfall at…

As I have said many times on this blog, if you want to know how much “global warming” is happening, you really have to be able to measure “ocean warming”. That is because more than 90% of the excess energy coming to the Earth from greenhouse gases goes into the ocean waters. My colleagues and…