Graph of the Day: Increase of airborne black carbon density in India from 2005 to 2016

By Kathryn Hansen 28 June 2018 (NASA) – In recent decades, northern India has been plagued by a double-dose of air pollution due to nearby sources of desert dust and increasing amounts of airborne particles from human activities. New research suggests that winds are spreading the problem, moving some of the pollution southward in ever-increasing […]

BP: Carbon emissions and coal consumption increased in 2017, reversing recent trends – “This should serve as a wake-up call for all of us”

By Spencer Dale 13 June 2018(BP) – At first blush, some of last year’s data might seem a little disappointing. Growth in overall energy demand is up; gains in energy intensity are down. Coal consumption grew for the first time in four years. And, perhaps most striking of all, carbon emissions are up after three […]

That NASA climate science program Trump axed? House lawmakers just moved to restore it

By Jeffrey Mervis 17 May 2018 (Science News) – A U.S. House of Representatives spending panel voted today to restore a small NASA climate research program that President Donald Trump’s administration had quietly axed. (Click here to read our earlier coverage.)The House appropriations panel that oversees NASA unanimously approved an amendment to a 2019 spending […]

Humans have destroyed 83 percent of wild mammals and reduced the total biomass of the biosphere to half of its pre-human value

By Damian Carrington 21 May 2018 (The Guardian) – Humankind is revealed as simultaneously insignificant and utterly dominant in the grand scheme of life on Earth by a groundbreaking new assessment of all life on the planet. The world’s 7.6 billion people represent just 0.01% of all living things, according to the study. Yet since […]

Trump White House quietly cancels NASA’s Carbon Monitoring System – “We really shoot ourselves in the foot if we let other people develop the technology”

By Paul Voosen 9 May 2018 (Science) – You can’t manage what you don’t measure. The adage is especially relevant for climate-warming greenhouse gases, which are crucial to manage—and challenging to measure. In recent years, though, satellite and aircraft instruments have begun monitoring carbon dioxide and methane remotely, and NASA’s Carbon Monitoring System (CMS), a […]

Fossil fuel emissions hit record high after unexpected growth in 2017

By Pep Canadell, Corinne Le Quéré, Glen Peters, Robbie Andrew, Rob Jackson, and Vanessa Haverd 13 November 2017 (The Conversation) – Global greenhouse emissions from fossil fuels and industry are on track to grow by 2% in 2017, reaching a new record high of 37 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, according to the 2017 Global […]

300 million years ago, the formation of coal almost turned Earth into a snowball – “By burning the coal, the CO2 is again destabilizing the Earth system”

10 October 2017 (PIK) – While burning coal today causes Earth to overheat, about 300 million years ago the formation of that same coal brought our planet close to global glaciation. For the first time, scientists show the massive effect in a study published in the renowned Proceedings of the US Academy of Sciences. When […]

New insights from NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 satellite showcased in Science magazine

  By Carol Rasmussen 12 October 2017 (JPL) – High-resolution satellite data from NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 are revealing the subtle ways that carbon links everything on Earth – the ocean, land, atmosphere, terrestrial ecosystems and human activities. Scientists using the first 2 1/2 years of OCO-2 data have published a special collection of five […]

Soil’s contribution to the carbon cycle in a warming world

AMHERST, Massachusetts, 5 October 2017 (UMass Amherst) – Microbiologist Kristen DeAngelis and her graduate student Grace Pold at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, with colleagues at Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) and in New Hampshire, report results in the Oct. 6 issue of Science from their study of warming-related soil carbon cycling changes in […]

Mathematics predicts a sixth mass extinction

By Jennifer Chu 20 September 2017 (MIT News) – In the past 540 million years, the Earth has endured five mass extinction events, each involving processes that upended the normal cycling of carbon through the atmosphere and oceans. These globally fatal perturbations in carbon each unfolded over thousands to millions of years, and are coincident […]

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