Climate Change

Australia’s east coast is recovering from a weekend of wild winds, waves and flooding, caused by a weather pattern known as an East Coast Low. Tragically, several people have died in flooding. Parts of New South Wales have received more than 400mm of rain since Friday morning. Some places such as...

Over the past year, carbon dioxide (CO₂) levels in the atmosphere have risen faster than any period in the past 55 million years. That’s the finding of my study published in Global Change Biology. From April 2015 to April 2016, CO₂ levels rose by 4.6 parts per million (ppm), reaching a level ...

Mongolia’s grasslands have sustained the nomadic people whose long history of raising livestock is legendary. But climate change, urbanization and bureaucracy are threatening the very existence of their herder culture, Nathan VanderKlippe reports Gantumur rides a stocky white horse out onto the s...

No one’s surprised that last month was the hottest April on record. And, it turns out, not even climate change deniers would bet against it. In April, Bill Nye bet two prominent climate change deniers $20,000 each that this year will be among the top 10 warmest years recorded and our current deca...

It’s been almost a month since the paper I co-authored on the synthesis of research into the scientific consensus on climate change was published. Surveying the many studies into scientific agreement, we found that more than 90% of climate scientists agree that humans are causing global warming. ...

Sea-level rise, erosion and coastal flooding are some of the greatest challenges facing humanity from climate change. Recently at least five reef islands in the remote Solomon Islands have been lost completely to sea-level rise and coastal erosion, and a further six islands have been severely erode...

Drought, fires, floods, marine heatwaves – Tasmania has had a tough time this summer. These events damaged its natural environment, including world heritage forests and alpine areas, and affected homes, businesses and energy security. In past decades, climate-related warming of Tasmania’s land ...

When we published a paper in 2013 finding 97% scientific consensus on human-caused global warming, what surprised me was how surprised everyone was. Ours wasn’t the first study to find such a scientific consensus. Nor was it the second. Nor were we the last. Nevertheless, no-one I spoke to was a...

This week, 193 world governments will begin putting pen to paper on the world’s first agreement to keep global warming below 2 degrees. This agreement is a huge symbolic blow to the fossil fuel industry, but it will remain symbolic unless politicians cut their ties with the culprits behind this cl...