James Renwick, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington
Earth’s has gone through major climate changes in the past. They happened on time scales of millions of years and triggered mass extinctions. Our emissions are changing the climate much faster.
Discussions about climate change often skirt around the issue of population growth, but it is the main driver of rising carbon dioxide levels and many other environmental changes on a planetary scale.
Droplets rising from the Champagne vent on the ocean floor in the Mariana Islands. Fluids venting from the site contain dissolved carbon dioxide.
NOAA Ocean Explorer
Lowell D. Stott, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Thousands of years ago, carbon gases trapped on the seafloor escaped, causing drastic warming that helped end the last ice age. A scientist says climate change could cause this process to repeat.
New data from a NASA satellite show in unprecedented detail the flow of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Future satellites should even be able to detect the signatures of individual power stations.
March for Science, Washington, D.C., April 29, 2017.
Shutterstock.com
Why is it so hard to reach consensus about how to slow climate change? Multiple time lags get in the way: some make it hard to convey the risk, while others prolong the search for solutions.
Extreme wet years are getting wetter and more common. This means Australia’s terrestrial ecosystems will play a larger role in the global carbon cycle.
Forests and other land-based carbon stores held onto more carbon during colder historical climates.
Miguel.v/Wikimedia Commons
When temperatures dipped between 1500 and 1750, the world’s landscapes responded by storing more carbon. Now, with temperatures climbing, it’s possible they will do the opposite and release even more.
Things got very wet, very quickly, in Brisbane in 2011.
AAP Image/Dave Hunt
Since 1999, Australia has swung between drought and deluge with surprising speed, because El Niño has fallen into sync with similar patterns in the Indian and Southern Oceans.
The warming global climate is causing fundamental changes to the carbon cycle in northern parts of the world.
peupleloup/flickr
Global warming is changing the movement of carbon within northern ecosystems to the point where the Arctic could become a net source, rather than sink, of greenhouse gas emissions.
Dr Mike Raupach died earlier this week after a brief illness. He passed away peacefully at home with his family in Canberra, Australia. He was 64. Mike was a brilliant and outstanding scientist. He was…
We were doing just fine before the oceans got involved.
Charles R. Knight (1916)
It’s well known that carbon in the atmosphere is causing global warming. What is less well known, outside of scientific circles at least, is the role oceans have to play in this. Our seas contain 60 times…
Lush rainforest above ground… spare a thought for what’s happening in the soil.
Tim Mowrer
It’s no exaggeration to say the tropics drive our planet’s carbon cycle – the constant transfer of carbon back and forth, on a global scale, between living things and the environment. Understanding the…
The swollen Fitzroy River in Queensland, Australia, where heavy rains in early 2011 led to extraordinary regrowth with a global impact.
Capt. W. M. & Tatters/Flickr
Record-breaking rains triggered so much new growth across Australia that the continent turned into a giant green carbon sink to rival tropical rainforests including the Amazon, our new research shows…