Some impacts of global warming – such as sea level rise and coastal flooding – are already locked in and unavoidable, according to a major research project. 

Acclimation means the ability of both animals and plants to adjust their physiology when it gets hotter or colder. In this way, individual organs are able to interact effectively and various processes in the body function optimally in varying conditions.

Two new studies from The University of Texas at Austin have significantly improved scientists’ ability to predict the strength and duration of droughts caused by La Niña – a recurrent cooling pattern in the tropical Pacific Ocean. Their findings, which predict that the current La Niña is likely to stretch into a second year, could help scientists know years in advance how a particular La Niña event is expected to evolve.

Many Pacific Island nations will lose 50 to 80 percent of marine species in their waters by the end of the 21st century if climate change continues unchecked, finds a new Nippon Foundation-Nereus Program study published in Marine Policy. This area of the ocean is projected to be the most severely impacted by aspects of climate change.

The Global Precipitation Measurement mission or GPM core satellite provided data on rainfall over Vietnam from the remnants of former Tropical Storm Haikui.

Deforested areas of the Amazon Basin have a limited ability to recover because of recent changes in climate, a study shows.

In a study published recently in Coral Reefs, scientists from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego created and analyzed detailed photomosaics of the coral reef at Palmyra Atoll, and made surprising discoveries around coral spatial ecology. The scientists, led by graduate student Clinton Edwards, canvassed more than 17,000 square feet of reef, and 44,008 coral colonies, taking more than 39,000 images that were then stitched together to create 3D photomosaics that encompassed the reef. 

Under global climate change, the Earth’s climatic zones will shift toward the poles. This is not just a future prediction; it is a trend that has already been observed in the past decades. The dry, semi-arid regions are expanding into higher latitudes, and temperate, rainy regions are migrating poleward. In a paper that that was recently published in Nature Geoscience, Weizmann Institute of Science researchers provide new insight into this phenomenon by discovering that mid-latitude storms are steered further toward the poles in a warmer climate. Their analysis, which also revealed the physical mechanisms controlling this phenomenon, involved a unique approach that traced the progression of low-pressure weather systems both from the outside – in their movement around the globe – and from the inside – analyzing the storms’ dynamics.  

Solar power will surge globally in the coming decades, but oil demand will also continue to grow, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency.

The world’s hottest summers on record will be the new norm within 20 years due to human-influenced climate change, says the president of the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium at the University of Victoria.

Climatologist Francis Zwiers co-authored a study confirming that sweltering summers as gauged by a long-standing measurement of human heat tolerance have become at least 70 times more likely over the past four decades. By 2050, virtually every summer will be hotter than any experienced to date.