Too Hot to Sleep: Nights Are Warming Faster than Days

Sleeping at the height of summer can sometimes feel impossible. And with gruelling heatwaves becoming more common

While the days of overt climate denial are mostly over, there’s a distinct form of denial emerging in its stead. You may have experienced it and not even realised. It’s called implicatory denial

Nowhere is nature more vibrant than in Earth’s tropical forests. Thought to contain more than half of all plant and animal species, the forests around Earth’s equator have sustained foragers and farmers since the earliest days of humanity.

Many young people feel anxious, powerless, sad and angry about climate change. Although there are some great resources on children’s eco-anxiety and climate distress, the vast majority are designed for and by adults.

With the federal government promising over US$360 billion in clean energy incentives under the Inflation Reduction Act, energy companies are already lining up investments.

Dengue, a viral infection spread by mosquitoes, is a common disease in parts of Asia and Latin America. Recently, though, France has experienced an outbreak of locally transmitted dengue.

The rising frequency and intensity of heat waves has been affecting people’s mental health by triggering various forms of emotional distress including eco-anxiety,

Although floods are a natural occurrence, human-caused climate change is making severe flooding events like these more common. 

Solar panels, heat pumps and hydrogen are all building blocks of a clean energy economy. But are they truly “essential to the national defense”?

We are facing a much different fire regime in a hotter, drier world. In the western U.S., the area burned by wildfires has doubled since the mid-1980s compared to natural levels. 

An extreme heatwave in India and Pakistan has left more than a billion people in one of the most densely populated parts of the world facing temperatures well above 40℃. Although this has not broken all-time records for the regions, the hottest part of the year is yet to come.

While the first decade of the 2000s saw huge growth in natural gas generation, and the 2010s were the decade of wind and solar, early signs suggest the innovation of the 2020s may be a boom in “hybrid” power plants.

It’s easy to feel pessimistic when scientists around the world are warning that climate change has advanced so far, it’s now inevitable that societies will either transform themselves or be transformed. But as two of theauthors of a recent international climate report, we also see reason for optimism.

The report finds that in addition to rapid and deep reductions in greenhouse emissions, CO₂ removal is “an essential element of scenarios that limit warming to 1.5℃ or likely below 2℃ by 2100”.

Waterfront homes are selling within days of going on the market, and the same story is playing out all along the South Florida coast at a time when scientificreportsare warning about the rising risks of coastal flooding as the planet warms.

Brace yourselves, allergy sufferers – new research shows pollen season is going to get a lot longer and more intense with climate change.

Scientists regularly study the ongoing degradation of Earth’s environment and track the changes wrought by a warming planet. Economists warn that intensifying disasters are harming people’s quality of life.

Climate change means extreme events such as floods, bushfires and droughts will become more frequent and severe. Those events will disrupt food supply chains, as people along Australia’s sodden east coast have seen again in recent weeks.

This isn’t the first time that Britain has experienced drastic climate change, however. By the 16th and 17th centuries, northern Europe had left its medieval warm period and was languishing in what is sometimes called the little ice age.

Mountain glaciers are essential water sources for nearly a quarter of the global population. But figuring out just how much ice they hold – and how much water will be available as glaciers shrink in a warming world – has been notoriously difficult.

China has more solar power capacity than any other country and makes many of the world’s solar cells, but coal is still its top energy source.

Coral reefs have long been regarded as one of the earliest and most significant ecological casualties of global warming.

Humans have cooked with fire for millennia, but it may be time for a change. Natural gas appliances warm the planet in two ways: generating carbon dioxide by burning natural gas as a fuel and leaking unburned methane into the air.