warming | Common News Update

Jul202023 by adminNo Comments

World will miss 1.5C warming limit – top UK expert

Science

Joaquin Sarmiento/Getty ImagesBy Esme Stallard & Justin RowlattBBC News Climate and ScienceA leading British climate scientist has told the BBC he believes the target to limit global warming to 1.5C will be missed. Professor Sir Bob Watson, former head of the UN climate body, told the BBC's Today programme he was "pessimistic".His warning comes amidst a summer of extreme heat for Europe, China and the US.The UN says passing the limit will expose millions more people to potentially devastating climate events.The world agreed to try to limit the temperature increase due to climate change to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels at a UN conference in Paris in 2015. That target has become the centrepiece of global efforts to tackle climate change.Climate scientists have been warning governments...

Mar242021 by adminNo Comments

For each degree of global warming, models predict 50% population displacement spike

Science

March 24 (UPI) -- As the planet warms, seas rise and climate change triggers shifts in precipitation patterns, scientists expect millions of people to be displaced by flooding and other forms of extreme weather. In an effort to more precisely quantify displacement risk, an international team of researchers combined a variety of climate and hydrological models. Advertisement Their analysis, published Wednesday in the journal Environmental Research Letters, showed a single degree of warming will increase the risk of displacement caused by river flooding by 50 percent. "Displacement poses many hardships, which often fall most heavily on socio-economically vulnerable groups, who tend to live in more hazard-prone areas," researchers wrote in their newly published paper. Since 2008, 288 millio...

Feb82021 by adminNo Comments

Global warming triggers earlier pollen

Technology

When Dr. Stanley Fineman started as an allergist in Atlanta, he told patients they should start taking their medications and prepare for the drippy, sneezy onslaught of pollen season around St. Patrick’s Day. That was about 40 years ago. Now he tells them to start around St. Valentine’s Day.Across the United States and Canada, pollen season is starting 20 days earlier and pollen loads are 21% higher since 1990 and a huge chunk of that is because of global warming, a new study found in Monday’s journal the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.While other studies have shown North America’s allergy season getting longer and worse, this is the most comprehensive data with 60 reporting stations and the first to make the required and detailed calculations that could attribut...

Jan62021 by adminNo Comments

Global warming to keep driving winds poleward, deep sea dust suggests

Science

Jan. 6 (UPI) -- New analysis of dust grains dredged from the bottom of the North Pacific suggests the westerlies moved toward the poles during the warmest stretches of the Pliocene, between 3 and 5 million years ago. Scientists on Wednesday published their findings in the journal Nature. Advertisement The westerlies, sometimes called the anti-trades, are a series of prevailing winds blowing from west to east across the middle latitudes. Over the last several decades, scientists have noticed the winds slowly migrating away from the equator, inching into higher and higher latitudes. "Much of the work that has been done in describing changes to the westerlies over the last several decades suggests that warming caused by greenhouse gases may be a major contributor to this movement of the wes...

Jan42021 by adminNo Comments

Study: Warming already baked in will blow past climate goals

Technology

A new study says the amount of global warming already baked into the air because of past carbon pollution is enough to blow past internationally agreed upon climate limitsBy SETH BORENSTEIN AP Science WriterJanuary 4, 2021, 10:18 PM• 4 min readThe amount of baked-in global warming, from carbon pollution already in the air, is enough to blow past international agreed upon goals to limit climate change, a new study finds.But it’s not game over because, while that amount of warming may be inevitable, it can be delayed for centuries if the world quickly stops emitting extra greenhouse gases from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, the study’s authors say.For decades, scientists have talked about so-called “committed warming” or the increase in future temperature based on past carbon diox...