Volcanic eruptions are one of the most important natural causes of climate change, playing a leading role over the past millennium. Injections of sulfate aerosols into the lower stratosphere will reduce the incoming solar radiation, which in turn cooling the surface. As a natural external forcing to the Earth’s climate system, the impact of volcanic aerosol on the climate has been of great concern to the scientific society and the public.

Researchers have found declines in the number and diversity of bird populations at nine sites surveyed in northern New Mexico, where eight species vanished over time while others had considerably dropped.

New research from Indiana University suggests that computer models used to predict the spread of epidemics from climate change -- such as crop blights or disease outbreaks -- may not take into account an important factor in predicting their severity.

Forests in the eastern United States may have had it easy compared to their western counterparts, with the intense, prolonged droughts and wildfires that have become typical out west in recent years. But as the climate changes over time, eastern forests are also likely to experience longer droughts. And although wildfires are comparatively rare, prescriptive fires are increasingly used in the east. How will these forests fare in the future? A new study from the University of Illinois provides answers.

In the newly published report, researchers from the Environmental Change Institute (ECI) at the School of Geography and Environment, Oxford University, who worked in collaboration with the World Weather Attribution network (WWA), reveal that climate change more than doubled the likelihood of the European heatwave, which could come to be known as regular summer temperatures.

At the end of July, Twitter user Alicia Santana posted a photo of a man sitting in a plastic folding chair in his yard. He’s looking away from the camera, towards a monstrous, orange cloud of smoke filling the sky beyond a wire fence. “My dad not wanting to leave his home,” Santana wrote, ending it with #MendocinoComplexFire.

In Alaska, fish means work, food, and life for local communities. Understanding the complex interconnections of the U.S. Arctic ecosystem takes close collaboration among scientific experts of many backgrounds.

Historic space weather may help us understand what’s coming next, according to new research by the University of Warwick.

Long before humans started injecting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels like oil, gas, and coal, the level of atmospheric CO2 rose significantly as the Earth came out of its last ice age. Many scientists have long suspected that the source of that carbon was from the deep sea.

This summer's world-wide heatwave makes 2018 a particularly hot year. As will be the next few years, according to a study led by Florian Sévellec, a CNRS researcher at the Laboratory for Ocean Physics and Remote Sensing (LOPS) (CNRS/IFREMER/IRD/University of Brest) and at the University of Southampton, and published in the 14 August 2018 edition of Nature Communications. Using a new method, the study shows that at the global level, 2018–2022 may be an even hotter period than expected based on current global warming.