The study represents the first systematic attempt to investigate whether a climate future with net-zero carbon emissions is not only possible but also plausible. They conclude that the efforts need to be far more ambitious.
The results imply that global surface warming of less than 1.7° Celsius by 2100 is not plausible, but nor is a rise of more than 4.9 degrees.
Paleoclimatologist Niels de Winter and colleagues developed an innovative way to use the clumped isotope method to reconstruct climate in the geological past on the seasonal scale. They show that dinosaurs had to deal with hotter summers than previously thought. The results suggest that in the mid latitudes, seasonal temperatures will likely rise along with climate warming, while seasonal difference is maintained. This results in very high summer temperatures.
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Researchers from Skoltech have designed and conducted experiments measuring gas permeability under various conditions for ice-containing sediments mimicking permafrost. Their results can be useful both in modeling and testing techniques for gas production from Arctic reservoirs and in tracing methane emission in high latitudes. The paper was published in the journal
Energy&Fuels.
Permafrost, even though it sounds very stable and permanent, is actually quite diverse: depending on the composition of the frozen ground, pressure, temperature and so on, it can have varying properties, which are extremely important if you want to build something on permafrost, such as an oil and gas field. Permafrost is also very gassy: it may contain a lot of natural gas in the form of hydrates, and its permeability is an important parameter both for research and for many activities in the Arctic.
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Credit: Irfan Rashid, Department of Geoinformatics, University of Kashmir
On February 7 of this year, the Chamoli district in the Uttarakhand region of India experienced a humanitarian tragedy when a veritable wall of rock and ice collapsed and formed a debris flow that barreled down the Ronti Gad, Rishiganga, and Dhauliganga river valleys. The massive slide, caused when a wedge of rock carrying a steep hanging glacier broke off a ridge in the Himalayan mountain range, and the resulting debris flow, led to the destruction of two hydropower generating facilities and left over two hundred people dead or missing.
A self-organized coalition of fifty-three scientists came together in the days following the disaster to investigate the cause, scope, and impact of the flood and landslide. Their study, which analysed satellite imagery, seismic records, and eyewitness videos to produce computer models of the flow, was published online today in the journal
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While the IPCC is in the midst of the drafting cycle of the Sixth Assessment Report, whose publication will start in the second half of 2021 - one of the most relevant events for the global climate change community, there is an ongoing debate on how to assess the feasibility of ambitious climate mitigation scenarios developed through integrated assessment models and to what extent they are actually achievable in the real world. In their new study published in
Environmental Research Letters, researchers from the RFF-CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environment (EIEE) and IIASA developed a systematic framework that allows identifying the type, timing, and location of feasibility concerns raised by climate mitigation scenarios.