17 July 2019 (AFP) – The concept of a carbon budget is dead simple: figure out how much CO2 humanity can pump into the atmosphere without pushing Earth’s surface temperature beyond a dangerous threshold. [cf. What Counts for Our Climate: Carbon Budgets Untangled and Budgeting for our future climate. –Des] The 2015 Paris climate treaty […]
9 June 2019 (Desdemona Despair) – It’s time to update one of Desdemona’s favorite graphs: human carbon emissions per capita. In the last update, four years ago, we had carbon emissions data through the year 2013, and it was clear that per-person emissions growth followed a nearly perfect exponential curve. The curve passed through one ton […]
By Kevin Krajick 29 April 2019 (Columbia University) – The world’s oceans soak up about a quarter of the carbon dioxide that humans pump into the air each year — a powerful brake on the greenhouse effect. In addition to purely physical and chemical processes, a large part of this is taken up by photosynthetic plankton as they incorporate carbon into their […]
4 June 2019 (NOAA) – Atmospheric carbon dioxide continued its rapid rise in 2019, with the average for May peaking at 414.7 parts per million (ppm) at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Atmospheric Baseline Observatory. The measurement is the highest seasonal peak recorded in 61 years of observations on top of Hawaii’s largest volcano and the seventh consecutive […]
By Chris Mooney 25 September 2018 (The Washington Post) – “The lake, about 20 football fields in size, looked as if it was boiling. Its waters hissed, bubbled and popped as a powerful greenhouse gas escaped from the lake bed. Some bubbles grew as big as grapefruits, visibly lifting the water’s surface several inches and […]
25 September 2018 (Nature) – Politics, according to the nineteenth-century German statesman Otto von Bismarck, is the art of the next best. The global approach of politicians to tackling climate change is a sorry example of this. The problem: destructive storms that hit the United States and southeast Asia this month are the latest reminder […]
By Adam Voiland 24 August 2018 (NASA) – Take a deep breath. Even if the air looks clear, it is nearly certain that you will inhale millions of solid particles and liquid droplets. These ubiquitous specks of matter are known as aerosols, and they can be found in the air over oceans, deserts, mountains, forests, […]
By Kathryn Hansen 17 August 2018(NASA) – In mid-August 2018, deadly blazes across the western United States and Canada continued to destroy structures and disrupt the lives of millions of people. But you did not have to be close to the fires to witness its effects. These images show just how far across North America […]
By Hannah Hickey 14 August 2018 (UW News) – More than 100 oceanic floats are now diving and drifting in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica during the peak of winter. These instruments are gathering data from a place and season that remains very poorly studied, despite its important role in regulating the global climate.A new […]
OAKLAND, California, 13 June 2018 (Global Footprint Network) – On August 1, humanity will have used nature’s resource budget for the entire year, according to Global Footprint Network, an international research organization that has pioneered the Ecological Footprint resource accounting metric. The Ecological Footprint adds up all of people’s competing demands for productive areas, including […]
