Climate Change

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Solar Geoengineering: Political and Security Challenges of ‘Dimming’ the Sun on the Horizon

In my open access article ‘Considering Stratospheric Aerosol Injections beyond an Environmental Frame: the ‘Emergency’ techno-fix and Preemptive Security’, I focus on a form of solar geoengineering known as Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) which is attracting increasing attention as a potential technological response to the growing problems associated with climate change.…

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Comments on Parasitology paper – Effects of parasitic freshwater mussels on their host fishes: a review

Starting my PhD in 2020 on the conservation of Swedish parasitic freshwater mussels (Order: Unionida), I initially noted a lack of effort put into the study of what these mussels actually do to their hosts. If our goal is to increase the number of these mussels in our lakes and rivers, this will inevitably have some downstream impact on their host fishes.

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Are modern-day plant-based foods taking us in the wrong direction?

We need to act now to limit increasing global temperatures by reducing greenhouse gas emissions to meet global targets set out in the Paris Agreement. Among other things, this means changing our diets and reducing our consumption of meat and dairy since livestock production has the highest environmental impact in the food system. Hence, the need to transition away from diets high in animal products to more plant-based diets.

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Environmental Data Science Communities – we are better together!

We are pleased to be collaborating with Guest Editors at NOAA, the Met Office, the German Aerospace Center, the Climate Research Centre in Singapore and Oxford University on a Call for Papers on the topic of Environmental Informatics (deadline for submission 12 November) for Environmental Data Science, a new open access journal published by Cambridge University Press.…

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A new moment for climate governance: Can President Biden save the world from climate change?

Within hours of assuming office, President Joe Biden began taking steps to reverse his predecessor’s devastating policies on climate change. He returned the United States to the Paris Agreement, declared that his administration would cooperate with other countries to tackle the problem, and pledged that Americans would substantially cut their greenhouse gas pollution.…

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Phenology and plant diversity drive CO2 exchange in grasslands

The article Phenology and plant functional type dominance drive COexchange in seminatural grasslands in the Pyrenees is available free for a month in the Journal of Agricultural Science Grasslands play a crucial role in climate change mitigation, since they are the most widespread terrestrial habitat in the world, storing an important amount of soil carbon.…

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What’s the beef with beef?

It’s fair to say that beef is getting a bad press at the moment. Hundreds of column inches have been dedicated to the argument that – whichever way you slice it – beef is bad for the planet.…

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Are shareholders the new champions of climate justice?

For several decades, individuals and communities affected by climate change – as well as the lawyers, advocates and civil society organizations who represent them – have been using litigation as a strategic tool to hold corporations accountable for climate change-related human rights harms.…

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Crop wild relatives – a vital resource for the future of food security

Crop wild relatives are wild plant species that are relatively closely related to cultivated crops and include the ancestors of cultivated crops. Crop wild relatives are a critical source of adaptive traits / genes, including resistance to diseases, pests and stresses such as drought and extreme temperatures that can be used in plant breeding, with the potential to enhance sustainable food security in the face of challenges such as climate change and population growth.

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Planning for Disasters in a Changing Environment

In October 2018 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a special report (SR15) warning of the impacts of a global rise in temperature above 1.5 C average, explaining that only 12 years remained before irreversible changes and disasters were ‘baked’ into the global system.…

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Thank the oceans for softening the blow of climate change

Climate change is the greatest challenge facing humanity. It’s an almighty catastrophe that will only become worse with time. We’ll be seeing more powerful storms, increasingly devastating wildfires, longer droughts and recurring floods, to name but a few of the impacts of climate change that are quickly becoming commonplace globally.…

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Organic smallholders are cultivating resilient rice systems

In the Philippines, organic rice systems are proving to be more climate resilient than conventional rice systems. This is according to a Self-evaluation and Holistic Assessment of climate Resilience of farmers and Pastoralists (SHARP), a methodological tool developed by a team at the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization.…

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CO2 beneath our feet

Climate change is currently one of the biggest threats to human existence. Carbon sequestration – the storage of CO2 underground – is one innovative method that could help to reduce the amount of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere and ultimately save the human species.…

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Waste not, want not: A Chicago sustainability story

The story of Chicago’s development is inextricably linked to its relationship with the natural environment, beginning 16,000 years ago when an enormous glacier sat on (and flattened) the land. Ever since, urban planners and policymakers have grappled with how to manage a city built on flat, swampy land, and what to do with the animal and human waste that accumulates in urban environments.

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Climate change helped kill off super-sized Ice Age animals in Australia

A new study in Paleobiology has compared the diet of a variety of Australian megafaunal herbivores from the period when they were widespread (350,000 to 570,000 years ago) to a period when they were in decline (30,000 to 40,000 years ago) by studying their fossil teeth. The analysis suggests that climate change had a significant impact on their diets and may well have been a primary factor in their extinction.

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Two glaciers collapse in western Tibet

A glacier near Lake Aru in western Tibet collapsed on 17 July 2016. Now the Journal of Glaciology publishes the first scientific account of this cryospheric disaster in which nine local yak herders were killed. Eyewitnesses reported that the episode lasted only four to five minutes. More than 70 million cubic metres of ice tumbled down a mountain valley, spreading over a distance of 6 kilometres onto the lowland below.

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Glaciology Q&A with Sérgio H. Fario

In this blog Sérgio H. Fario – one of four new Associate Chief Editors for the journals of the International Glaciological Society, Journal of Glaciology and Annals of Glaciology – answers questions on where glaciology is at now, where it is going and how it is being affected by climate change.…

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Hedging in the Anthropocene: the risks and rewards of a fossil fuel versus a photovoltaic energy supply

The climate is changing. We have left the Holocene and entered the Anthropocene, the era in which human enterprise is pushing the planetary functioning of essential cycles (e.g. of CO2) into a potentially unstable regime. Human enterprise, by burning fossil fuels for electrical, heat and motive power is the central cause of climate change, and is driven by an economic system that promotes insatiable consumption.

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Giant iceberg decimates Adélie penguin colonies

Source: Study: Giant iceberg decimates Adélie penguin colonies – UNSW Science for society Adélie penguin numbers at Cape Denison in Antarctica have crashed from more than 160,000 birds in 2011 down to just a few thousand following the grounding of a giant 97-kilometre long iceberg in Commonwealth Bay.…

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Suitable Sheep Selection

The type of sheep that farmers breed for need to be suited to the farm they are managed on. To pick the best type of sheep, farmers need to know how their sheep can make more money for their farm.

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