Hottest years on record

Earth is on track to sail past the two degree Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) threshold for dangerous global warming by 2050, seven of the world's top climate scientists warned Thursday. "Climate change is happening now, and much faster than anticipated," said Sir Robert Watson, former head of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), the body charged with distilling climate science for policy makers. Since 1990, devastating weather-related events including floods, drought, more intense storms, heat waves and wild fires, due to climate change have doubled in number, Watson and the other scientists said in a report. "Without additional efforts by all major emitters (of greenhouse gases), the 2C target could be reached even sooner," he told journalists in a phone briefing. The planet has already heated up 1.0 C (1.8 F) above the pre-industrial benchmark, and could see its first year at 1.5 C within a decade, scientists reported at a conference in Oxford last … [Read more...] about Global warming set to pass 2C threshold in 2050: report

Eight months after 195 nations concluded a hard-fought climate rescue pact, pressure is mounting to put its carbon-cutting promises into action as world leaders gather at G20 and UN meetings this month. The historic deal reached in Paris in December has been signed by 180 countries, but will only take effect after 55 nations responsible for 55 percent of greenhouse gas emissions have ratified it, making it binding. China and the United States, jointly responsible for about 38 percent of global emissions, ratified the pact on Saturday, on the eve of a meeting of G20 leaders meeting in Hangzhou, China, considerably boosting efforts. Until Beijing and Washington joined the club, only 24 nations emitting just over one percent of global gases had officially acceded, according to the U.N. climate body overseeing the deal to cap global warming at two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-Industrial Revolution levels. "As 2016 heads into the record books as likely the hottest … [Read more...] about Climate pact: After years of talk, focus shifts to action

Tiny natural ponds pose an overlooked danger for speeding up global warming, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change. In experiments designed to simulate moderate future warming, scientists in Britain found that such ponds -- a meter (three feet) across -- gradually lose the capacity to soak up one kind of greenhouse gas and give off even more of another. After seven years at higher-than-ambient temperatures, "the ability of the ponds to absorb carbon dioxide was reduced by almost half, while methane release nearly doubled," said lead-author Gabriel Yvon-Durocher, a professor at the University of Exeter. "Both those trends became amplified over time," he told AFP. With soil, by contrast, warming initially stimulates CO2 output but then causes it to taper off. The new findings matter because small ponds play an outsized role in the planet's carbon cycle -- the balance between input and output of greenhouse gases. While covering only a tiny … [Read more...] about Small ponds have outsized impact on global warming: study