News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
As Earth heats up from the burning of fossil fuels, the climate conditions that species have adapted to are increasingly shifting away from their historical ranges. But while birds and other animals can often fly, walk or swim to follow their preferred environment, plants are quite literally rooted to the ground. They require outside forces … Read more
Extreme heat threatens to effect all of California in coming years, prompting state officials to outline life-saving measures in an adaptation report released this week. Average annual temperatures have already jumped in California by more than 1 degree Fahrenheit, and it has exceeded 2 F in some areas, according to the analysis by the California … Read more
The world’s oceans reached their hottest levels on record in 2021. It’s the third year in a row it’s happened, and it’s driven almost entirely by human-caused climate change, scientists announced yesterday. The findings are presented in a paper published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences. As excess heat accumulates in the atmosphere, caused by continued greenhouse … Read more
Bush fire season is underway again in Australia, where summer has just kicked off. Yet the country is still recovering from record-breaking wildfires two years ago that killed at least 33 people, destroyed thousands of homes and burned more than 65,000 square miles of land. How quickly the natural landscape recovers depends on the climate … Read more
Hurricane Ida, which cut a path of destruction from Louisiana to New York last year, is being recognized as one of the most destructive storms in U.S. history and the world’s costliest natural disaster in 2021. But the Category 4 hurricane also is becoming a poster child for government spending on flood protection. Analysts say … Read more
Unseen dangers accompanied deadly flames in the record-breaking wildfire season that raged across the U.S. West in 2020. In addition to the millions of acres burned by the blazes, the thousands of structures they destroyed and the dozens of people they killed, the 2020 fires brought some of the worst air quality conditions ever observed … Read more
A devastating mudslide ripped through Sierra Leone’s capital of Freetown in August 2017, burying homes and killing at least 1,100 people. Triggered by weeks of unusually heavy rain, it was one of the worst environmental disasters the region had experienced in years. More than four years later, scientists are concerned that it could happen again. … Read more
Carbon emissions from wildfires broke records around the world this summer, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service. Parts of Siberia produced their highest fire-related emissions since the agency first began keeping tabs in 2003. Ditto for the western United States. Altogether, wildfires worldwide spewed about 1.76 billion metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere. … Read more
It feels like we are lurching from one disaster to another: as wildfires blaze across part of the country, a hurricane swamps a different area—and all this happens as a pandemic continues to rage. Costs are steadily mounting, making action to stem the release of greenhouse gases ever more urgent. Hopes on that front remained … Read more
Climbing concentrations of carbon dioxide make it likely that humans will have to move some gases from the atmosphere into the oceans to prevent crippling effects of climate change, the National Academies said in a major report released yesterday. It came after months of deliberation among top U.S. scientists who concluded that global efforts to … Read more