Science Daily: Climate News

A new study seeks to tease out some of the myriad pressures that drive adaptation in small, widely dispersed marine animals called copepods.

An in-depth look at Australia's Great Barrier Reef over the past 91 years concludes that since 1928 intertidal communities have experienced major phase-shifts as a result of local and global environmental change, leaving few signs that reefs will return to their initial state in the near future. The long-term implications of these changes highlight the importance of avoiding phase shifts in coral reefs which may take many decades to repair, if at all.

Many scientists have said that storms are more intense than ever before - Cat. 4 or 5 storms used to be outliers, but today, it seems they are becoming the norm. Why? That's the question a research team is working to answer - they are looking what contributes to the rapid intensification of storms.

Oysters bred for fast growth and disease resistance are able to adapt their shell growth to protect themselves from environmental acidification, according to new research.

The number of meltwater lakes on the surface of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet is more significant than previously thought, according to new research.

Wheat supplies about 20 percent of all calories consumed by humans. In a new study, researchers found that up to 60 percent of current wheat-growing areas worldwide could see simultaneous, severe and prolonged droughts by the end of the century.

Humans have never before lived with the high carbon dioxide atmospheric conditions that have become the norm on Earth in the last 60 years, according to a new study.

Emissions of greenhouse gases have a warming effect on the climate, whereas small airborne particles in the atmosphere, aerosols, act as a cooling mechanism. That is the received wisdom in any case. However, new research can now show that the tiniest aerosols are increasing at the expense of the normal sized and slightly larger aerosols -- and it is only the latter that have a cooling effect.

A satellite on schedule to launch in 2021 could offer a more comprehensive look at flooding in vulnerable, under-studied parts of the world, including much of Africa, South America and Indonesia, a new study has found.

For most plants, carbon dioxide acts like a steroid: The more they can take in, the bigger they get. But scientists have now discovered something strange happening in marshes. Under higher levels of carbon dioxide, instead of producing bigger stems, marsh plants produced more stems that were noticeably smaller.

A study estimates global-scale, multi-sectoral economic impacts of climate change, and suggests that a plausible range of decisions and actions by humans can determine the scale of the economic impacts, even if the uncertainty in the climate response to increased greenhouse gas concentration is considered. These actions include reductions of greenhouse gas emissions and improvement of socioeconomic conditions. This study highlights the importance of societal changes and the current generation's responsibility for the future.

A new study provides information on how to invest in natural coastal ecosystems that the Bahamian government, community leaders and development banks are applying in post-disaster recovery and future storm preparation in the Bahamas.

The wind is always blowing somewhere, but deciding where to locate a wind farm is a bit more complicated than holding up a wet finger. Now a team of researchers has a model that can locate the best place for the wind farm and even help with 24-hour predictions of energy output.

Figuring out what lies ahead for our species and our planet is one of the most pressing and challenging tasks for climate scientists. While models are very useful, there is nothing quite like Earth's history to reveal details about how oceans, animals, and plants respond to and recover from a warming world.

A magma ocean existing during the core formation is thought to have been highly depleted in carbon due to its high-siderophile (iron loving) behavior. Thus, most of the carbon forming the atmosphere and life on Earth may have been delivered by a carbon-rich embryo after the core formation. However, a new high-pressure experiment has shown that previous studies may have overestimated the amount of carbon partitioning to the core.

Scientists have seen for the first time how corals collaborate with other microscopic life to build and grow.

An increase in the generation of wind energy is a key component of the U.S. strategy to reduce carbon emissions from the power sector. Approximately 97 gigawatts of wind energy production capacity are currently installed in the U.S., and in 2018, wind energy supplied about 6.5% of the nation's electricity. Scenarios developed by various groups, including U.S. Department of Energy, indicate that a four- to five-fold expansion over current levels of electricity produced by wind is needed by the year 2050 to help meet U.S. carbon emission reduction goals.

A key theory that attributes the climate evolution of the Earth to the breakdown of Himalayan rocks may not explain the cooling over the past 15 million years, according to a new study. The study could shed more light on the causes of long-term climate change. It centers on the long-term cooling that occurred before the recent global warming tied to greenhouse gas emissions from humanity.

The Sahara Desert is vast, generously dusty, and surprisingly shy about its age. New research looking into what appears to be dust that the Sahara blew over to the Canary Islands is providing the first direct evidence from dry land that the age of the Sahara matches that found in deep-sea sediments: at least 4.6 million years old.

Researchers have analyzed mountain ranges worldwide to show that a theory relating erosion and mountain height doesn't always add up.