Natural disasters around the world last year caused a record US$380 billion in economic losses. That’s more than twice the tally for 2010, and about $115 billion more than in the previous record year of 2005, according to a report from Munich Re, a reinsurance group in Germany. But other work emphasizes that it is too soon to blame the economic devastation on climate change.
Climate change is affecting the world in many ways. But attempts to directly link local changes in species distribution and biodiversity to climate warming hold little promise, ecologists warn in Nature Climate Change. First author Camille Parmesan, a population biologist at the University of Texas in Austin, explains why.
After months of soul-searching, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has agreed on reforms intended to restore confidence in its integrity and its assessments of climate science.
In his popular 2008 book Climate Wars, the US journalist and military historian Gwynne Dyer laid out a daunting scenario. Climate change would put growing pressure on fresh water and food over the coming century, he wrote, triggering social disorder, mass migration and violent conflict.
The humble Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba) bears a heavy burden. It may be just a small, shrimp-like crustacean, but its sheer abundance makes it one of the largest protein sources on Earth, eagerly sought by fish, penguins, whales
The Great Aletsch Glacier is ill. Over the course of the twentieth century, the largest Alpine glacier, in Valais, Switzerland, receded by more than two kilometres, and Switzerland
Driven by efforts to curb fossil-fuel use and concerns about the security of energy supplies, the number of applications for renewable-energy patents is booming. But the patents are scattered across many databases, in different formats that are not readily searchable, leading to a lack of clarity over who owns specific energy-technology patents, and in which regions.
A thousand years after the last ice age ended, the Northern Hemisphere was plunged back into glacial conditions. For 20 years, scientists have blamed a vast flood of meltwater for causing this
