Global News
- Details
- Category: Global News
A new tool can better assess an important but overlooked indicator of global warming: the variety of bugs, worms, and snails living in high mountain streams.
Water-based invertebrates are especially vulnerable when the climate swings from historic droughts to massive floods. Because they serve as food for other forms of alpine life, such as birds, bats, frogs, and fish, ecologists worry about the insects’ ability to thrive.
- Details
- Category: Global News
In 2010-2019 average annual global greenhouse gas emissions were at their highest levels in human history, but the rate of growth has slowed. Without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors, limiting global warming to 1.5°C is beyond reach. However, there is increasing evidence of climate action, said scientists in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released today.
Since 2010, there have been sustained decreases of up to 85% in the costs of solar and wind energy, and batteries. An increasing range of policies and laws have enhanced energy efficiency, reduced rates of deforestation and accelerated the deployment of renewable energy.
- Details
- Category: Global News
Using lake sediment in the Tibetan Plateau, a team of researchers was able to show that permafrost at high elevations is more vulnerable than arctic permafrost under projected future climate conditions.
From the ancient sludge of lakebeds in Asia's Tibetan Plateau, scientists can decipher a vision of Earth's future. That future, it turns out, will look very similar to the mid-Pliocene warm period – an epoch 3.3 million to 3 million years ago when the average air temperature at mid-latitudes rarely dropped below freezing. It was a time when permanent ice was just beginning to cling to the northern polar regions, and mid-latitude alpine permafrost – or perpetually frozen soil – was much more limited than today.
- Details
- Category: Global News
Much of a centuries-old debate over where and how new bird species form has now been resolved. Researchers at the University of Copenhagen have provided evidence that birds in mountainous areas – where the vast majority of the planet’s species live – have left lowland habitats for higher and higher mountain elevations throughout their evolution. Millions of years of climatic fluctuations have contributed to pushing bird species upslope – as is probably happening now.
One of the fundamental questions in biology, and a centuries-old academic debate, is: How do new species form? And, how do species end up on mountain tops several kilometers high? Indeed, 85% of the world's vertebrates – birds included – live in mountainous areas where lowland habitats isolate animal species and populations from one another.
- Details
- Category: Global News
New research, led by Dr Petra Holden from the African Climate and Development Initiative (ACDI), has shown how catchment restoration - through the management of alien tree infestation in the mountains of the southwestern Cape - could have lessened the impact of climate change on low river flows during the Cape Town 'Day Zero' drought.
Climate change is impacting extreme weather events such as droughts and floods. Nature-based solutions, such as catchment restoration, involve working with ecosystems and landscapes to address societal challenges. These challenges include the impacts of climate change on water resources. Up to now, studies have not separated the role of nature-based solutions in reducing the human-driven climate change impacts of extreme events on water availability from that of natural climate variability.
- Details
- Category: Global News
Human-induced climate change is causing dangerous and widespread disruption. Safeguarding and strengthening nature is key to securing a liveable future, latest IPCC report says.
Human-induced climate change is causing dangerous and widespread disruption in nature and affecting the lives of billions of people around the world, despite efforts to reduce the risks. People and ecosystems least able to cope are being hardest hit, said scientists in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, released today.
- Details
- Category: Global News
Satellite images could offer a new way to monitor for avalanche threats to remote mountain communities, according to University of Aberdeen scientists studying deadly Himalayan avalanche.
The team from the University of Aberdeen’s School of Geosciences used satellite imaging to study the movements of two avalanche events, in 2016 and 2021, that happened in the same Himalayan valley. The most severe of these, which struck a high-mountain township in India’s Chamoli district on February 7 last year, caused a flash flood that killed more than 200 people and destroyed key infrastructure.
- Details
- Category: Global News
Melting and sublimation on Mount Everest's highest glacier due to human-induced climate change have reached the point that several decades of accumulation are being lost annually now that ice has been exposed, according to a University of Maine-led international research team that analyzed data from the world's highest ice core and highest automatic weather stations.
The extreme sensitivity of the high-altitude Himalayan ice masses in rapid retreat forewarns of quickly emerging impacts that could range from increased incidence of avalanches and decreased capacity of the glacier stored water on which more than 1 billion people depend to provide melt for drinking water and irrigation.
