Improve your soil and monitor the changing climate as a citizen scientist Did you know satellites are constantly monitoring soil moisture, even in your garden? Monitoring the moisture in soil can help predict floods, fires and droughts. On this course, you will learn about the ESA’s Sentinel-1 Missions, and how citizens can validate satellite data…

THE MEMO “Human activity impacts our changing climate in some manner. The ability to measure with precision the degree and extent of that impact, and what to do about it, are subject to continuing debate and dialogue.” THE SCIENCE “To say that ‘human activity impacts our changing climate ‘in some manner’, is analogous to saying…

Climate change will be the fastest-growing cause of species loss in the Americas by midcentury, according to a new set of reports from the leading global organization on ecosystems and biodiversity. Climate change, alongside factors like land degradation and habitat loss, is emerging as a top threat to wildlife around the globe, the reports suggest….

Sixty-nine percent of Republicans surveyed in a Gallup poll released Wednesday said they think the seriousness of global warming is exaggerated, up from 66 percent a year ago. That compares with only 4 percent of Democrats who think concerns are exaggerated, down from 10 percent in 2017. Other key measures of climate change opinions showed…

A federal court has ruled against a U.S. Interior Department plan to open more than 15 million acres of public land and mineral rights to fossil fuel extraction, concluding that the government failed to adequately consider how the oil, gas and coal development would affect the climate and other environmental resources. The U.S. District Court…

  Language bends and buckles under pressure of climate change. Take the adjective “glacial.” I recently came across an old draft of my PhD dissertation on which my advisor had scrawled the rebuke: ‘You’re proceeding at a glacial pace. You’re skating on thin ice.’ That was in 1988, the year that the climatologist James Hansen…

At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, the Greenland ice sheet hosted a number of clandestine U.S. Army bases whose job it was to get an estimated 600 medium-range ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads ready for deployment. The largest of these sites was Camp Century, which had the public facade of a…

Scientists have devised a method for predicting how rising global temperatures are likely to affect the severity of diseases mediated by parasites. Their method can be applied widely to different host-pathogen combinations and warming scenarios, and should help to identify which infectious diseases will have worsened or diminished effects with rising temperatures. The proof-of-concept method,…

California officials are taking their first, tentative steps toward requiring cities to plan for severe sea level rise that scientists now say could conceivably elevate high tides by up to 22 feet by the middle of the next century. Such a deluge would overtake much of San Francisco’s southeastern waterfront, submerge huge swaths of West…

This report, which focuses on three regions—Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America that together represent 55 percent of the developing world’s population—finds that climate change will push tens of millions of people to migrate within their countries by 2050. It projects that without concrete climate and development action, just over 143 million people—or around…