Nine of climate “tipping points” active today
Reading Time: 3 minutesMORE than half of the climate tipping points identified a decade ago are now “active”, a group of leading scientists have warned. This threatens the loss of the Amazon rainforest and the great ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, which are currently undergoing measurable and unprecedented changes much earlier than expected. This “cascade” of changes […]
New England fishermen losing jobs due to climate fluctuations
Reading Time: < 1 minuteNEW ENGLAND has a proud tradition of commercial fishing. But will it survive as the planet warms? For decades the biggest threat to the industry has been overfishing, but it is no longer the only threat. According to new research at the University of Delaware, fluctuations in the climate have already cost some New England […]
Seasonal migrations shift earlier
Reading Time: 2 minutesIN what the authors believe is one of the first studies to examine climate change impact on the timing of bird migration on a continental scale, researchers report that spring migrants were likely to pass certain stops earlier now than they would have 20 years ago. Also, temperature and migration timing were closely aligned, with […]
Global academy network stands up for tropical forests
Reading Time: 2 minutesTHE InterAcademy Partnership (IAP), the global network of over 140 academies of sciences, engineering and medicine, choose Cop25 to release its Communique on Tropical Forest. This document outlines a set of necessary measures aimed not only at protecting forests worldwide, but also fighting climate change. IAP, whose academy members constitute more than 30,000 leading scientists, […]
COP 25 ends on a low note
Reading Time: 2 minutesTHE United Nations Climate Talks sat for 12 days in Madrid but ended on a low note on Dec 15 – without any strong conclusive consensus. Delegates from nearly 200 nations attended the 2019 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP25) and were kept 40 hours past their planned deadline. But some of the […]
Quotable Quotes from UN Climate Summit Action
Reading Time: 3 minutesThe international community, instead of preparing for war, should be paying attention to climate change and accompanying natural disasters. – Mahathir Mohamad, Prime Minister of Malaysia We must reverse the nefarious consequences of global warming, which is a powerful threat to our planet and to humanity – José Condugua António Pacheco, Foreign Minister of Mozambique […]
Climate change – It’s now or never
Reading Time: 2 minutesBY JOSEPH MASILAMANY AS HUGE GLACIAL ice bodies melt, a harsh new climate report pointedly highlights that the impact of climate change is literally racing across to our doorsteps as sea levels are rising much faster than expected. The report by the United Nations-led Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), however, says: “It is still […]
Could climate change make Siberia habitable?
Reading Time: 3 minutesA STUDY team from the Krasnoyarsk Federal Research Center, Russia, and the National Institute of Aerospace, USA, used current and predicted climate scenarios to examine the climate comfort of Asian Russia and work out the potential for human settlement throughout the 21st century. They published their results in Environmental Research Letters. At 13 million square […]
Banana disease boosted by climate change
Reading Time: < 1 minuteCLIMATE CHANGE has raised the risk of a fungal disease that ravages banana crops, new research shows. Black Sigatoka disease emerged from Asia in the late 20th Century and has recently completed its invasion of banana-growing areas in Latin America and the Caribbean. The new study, by the University of Exeter, says changes to moisture […]
Could climate change cause infertility?
Reading Time: 2 minutesTHE scientific community has long held an understanding about the effect of temperature on sperm production in mammals, but this new study sheds light on how spermatogenesis in insects is hampered at extreme temperatures. In the new scientific paper, published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, and an academic letter recently published in Trends in […]