Understanding Sea Level Rise 6: SLR benefits of keeping warming below 1.5 degrees (IPCC & Pattyn)

If you do one about agriculture, you gotta do one for your sea level rise series too, we heard you say.

Climate & Agriculture 4: Yes, heat stress also affects wheat – recent European summers show

Part 3 of this series about the impacts of climate change on global agriculture was centred around a climate model study that indicated major global crop belts could experience production declines as a result of increased heat stress. These authors … Continue reading

Climate Change & Anthropocene Extinction 36: Ocean plastic outpaces warming & CO2 in race to bottom

Earth’s oceans currently take up almost 50% of our CO2 emissions and absorb over 90% of the heat the other half of the CO2 traps in the atmosphere. Both ocean CO2 and heat absorption will have major consequences for deep-sea … Continue reading

Climate Change & Anthropocene Extinction 28: If the Amazon goes, so may Africa’s rainforests

The Congolese rainforests are the world’s second largest remaining tropical rainforest expanse and a 60 gigatonne carbon store. Although climate models have a hard time predicting rainfall changes over the Congo Basin and despite a multi-decade drying trend, these forests … Continue reading

Climate Change & Anthropocene Extinction 8: Locally biodiversity might increase, kick-starting (global) decline

As species migrate in response to climate change and do so at different rates and dispersal directions, extra ecosystem disturbances might arise, leading to temporary local biodiversity increases – fuelling a net (global) downward trend.

Understanding Sea Level Rise, p3: it’s about timescales, speed of change & carbon budget – world aims for 29-55m sea level rise

In our previous article of the series we’ve looked at an overview of global sea level rise forecasts for the year 2100 – and seen that these forecasts have a very large spread, and also seem to increase with time … Continue reading

Real Global Temperature Trend, p16 – Climate System Thermal Inertia: Trend Line = 0.6C higher than observed temperatures show

In part 16 of our temperature trend series we take a better look at one of the main reasons almost everyone still underestimates climate urgency: ‘Thermal inertia’ of the climate system – a delay between the moment of emissions of … Continue reading

Gulf Stream may not collapse, it may gradually come to a halt – these AMOC graphs show

Here at Bitsofscience.org we’ve written quite extensively on why a direct shutdown of the Gulf Stream is unlikely – and that the collapse scenario featured in that one movie we only ever saw the trailer of probably did not even … Continue reading

Trees starting to grow in the Arctic due to climate change could cause carbon dioxide release

Carbon stored in Arctic tundra could be released into the atmosphere by new trees growing in the warmer region, exacerbating climate change, scientists have revealed.

The Arctic is getting greener as plant growth increases in response to a warmer climate. This greater plant growth means more carbon is stored in the increasing biomass, so it was previously thought the greening would result in more carbon dioxide being taken up from the atmosphere, thus helping to reduce the rate of global warming.

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