Climate deal unveiled in Paris, a ‘historic turning point’

Global climate envoys agreed a landmark accord on Saturday, setting the course for a “historic” transformation of the world’s fossil fuel-driven economy within decades in a bid to arrest global warming. At the tail end of the hottest year on record and after four years of fraught U.N. talks often pitting the interests of rich nations against poor, imperiled island […]

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Humans’ indelible mark on new era

Geologists are convinced that humans have left a mark upon the planet that will detectable millions of years from now. Long after human civilization has perished, there could be a stratum of fossilized rock and a geological time zone that says: “We were here.” So there is a case for calling the present epoch “the Anthropocene” − probably dating from […]

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Warming adds to pressure on bats

Across the world, bats are in trouble from climate change – not only through collisions with the wind turbines that are intended to mitigate its effects, but from what the increasing warmth does to their ability to find their prey. Bats often get a bad press, portrayed as disease-spreading bloodsuckers. In fact, they perform a vital role as pollinators, seed […]

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A Changing Jet Stream

Climate Changes

Climate change appears to be affecting the jet stream, altering the weather patterns over the U.S. so that regions can get “stuck” in extreme weather for weeks, a new study has found. The jet stream is the fast-moving, high-altitude air current that shuttles weather from west to east over North America and Europe. But the pronounced warming of the Arctic—where […]

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Heat is heading for new extremes

Heatwaves that used to arrive once every 20 years or so could become annual events by 2075 across almost two-thirds of the planet’s land surface – if humans go on burning ever more fossil fuels and releasing ever more greenhouse gases. Claudia Tebaldi, visiting scientist at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, and Michael Wehner, senior staff scientist at […]

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Antarctic ice sheet is more vulnerable to carbon dioxide than expected

Results from a new climate reconstruction of how Antarctica’s ice sheets responded during the last period when atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) reached levels like those expected to occur in about 30 years, plus sediment core findings reported in a companion paper, suggest that the ice sheets are more vulnerable to rising atmospheric CO2 than previously thought. Details appear in two […]

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