What has six-hundred tons of volcanic rocks sitting in a giant steel tub, thousands of gallons of water spouting from a network of pipes, and 1,800 sensors scattering three identical hillslopes collecting information? If you guessed the world’s only and largest manmade experimental watershed, then you’re correct! (more…)

A team of British and Australian scientists has discovered an important carbon sink from water drawn down from the surface of the Southern Ocean to the deep waters beneath. The Southern Ocean is an important carbon sink in the world — around 40% of the annual global CO2 emissions absorbed by the world’s oceans enter through this region. Reporting this week (more…)

Andrew Weaver is a notable Canadian climate scientist. He’s recently written a short book for the general reader to give an easily understandable account of the science of human-caused climate change, to explain its impacts and to suggest solutions. The book is published as one of the Rapid Reads series (more…)

Monks from the 1600s now have a hand predicting future climate change. No, this isn’t about Nostradamus. Rather, researchers from the University of Edinburgh are using monks’ diaries to reconstruct temperature records from the past to improve future predictions.

The researchers wanted to confirm climate (more…)

Research conducted by the University of Bristol, and the University of Leeds in the UK have demonstrated that our climate models may be underestimating the effects of CO2 on global temperatures.

In the long term, the Earth’s temperature may be 30-50 per cent more sensitive to atmospheric carbon dioxide

than has previously been estimated, reports a new study published in Nature Geoscience this week.

The results show that components of the Earth’s climate system that vary over long timescales — such as land-ice and vegetation — have an important effect on this temperature sensitivity, but these factors are often neglected in current climate models.

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