Tag Archives: climate

As subduction zones burned through the carbon-rich crust at the edges of the Pangaea supercontinent, any rock weathering that might have buried carbon dioxide now sputtered in the vast interior. Rainforests dried out and carbon dioxide levels ticked steadily upward. The planet stumbled toward apocalypse. On a world fully stocked with reptiles, dazzling reefs, ammonoids, sharks, massive amphibians, trilobites, giant …

“Anything that is polysyllabic and Latinate doesn’t sound threatening enough,” said Michael Ghil, a mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies theoretical climate dynamics. “‘Tipping points’ does.” The idea that there had been major shifts in the Earth’s climate was by then well established. Scientists had found geological evidence that supported the Snowball Earth hypothesis. They’d seen …

In May, the Trump administration released its fiscal 2026 budget request, which called for cutting National Science Foundation and NASA science budgets by more than half. The administration’s proposed NOAA budget, released a few weeks later, proposes eliminating the agency’s scientific research arm altogether, terminating over 1,000 additional employees and shuttering around a dozen institutes, including GFDL. It includes the …

Trump’s killing of climate grants has recipients second-guessing federal help  Politico A triple win for Trump’s EPA  The Hill The EPA’s Ability to Kill Climate Justice Gets New Life  Word In Black Inclusiv, Others Seek Full Court Review of EPA’s Solar Grant Cancellation  Credit Union Times ‘Green banks’ petition for rehearing in $14B EPA funding freeze case  ESG Dive Source link

The birth of an island is normally a process that requires the movement of vast tectonic plates over centuries, if not millennia. But in Alaska, a new island has popped up in just four decades. The two-square-mile (five sq km) landmass, known as Prow Knob, was once entirely surrounded by the deep ice of the Alsek Glacier. But NASA has revealed …

New research shows that the presence of dust can cause the tops of clouds—such as these seen over the Sahara Desert—to freeze more easily. Credit: Diego Villanueva/ETH Zürich. Dust plays a major role in the formation of ice in the atmosphere. A new analysis of satellite data, published in Science, shows that dust can cause a cloud’s water droplets to freeze at …

Claremont McKenna takes the top spot, while Barnard College, Columbia University, and Indiana University come in last. 166 of the 257 schools surveyed got an F for their speech climate. For the first time ever, a majority of students would prevent speakers from both the left and right who express controversial views, ranging from abortion to transgender issues, from stepping …

A team of the world’s best ice and climate researchers studied a handful of recently publicized engineering concepts for protecting Earth’s polar ice caps and found that none of them are likely to work. Their peer-reviewed research, published Tuesday, shows some of the untested ideas, such as dispersing particles in the atmosphere to dim sunlight or trying to refreeze ice …

We’ve arrived at the peak week of hurricane season – the traditional midpoint of the Atlantic’s yearly activity is September 10 – but you wouldn’t know it from the Tropical Weather Outlook issued by the National Hurricane Center, or NHC, on Monday, September 8. The headline: “Tropical cyclone activity is not expected during the next 7 days.” As we reported last …

A tropical wave located a few hundred miles west-southwest of the Cabo Verde Islands on Wednesday morning was growing more organized, and was designated Invest 91L by the National Hurricane Center Thursday morning. The wave was headed west-northwest at about 5-10 mph, and satellite imagery showed that it had a small area of heavy thunderstorms that had acquired a moderate …