Severe wildfire conditions from heat and drought can’t be reversed and will increase if temperatures continue to warm, but different policies dealing with how to manage land vulnerable to wildfires can help reduce the risk, says Noah Diffenbaugh.
"Rolling back emissions standards won’t just harm the climate, it will kill people, especially poorer people more likely to live near coal-fired power plants," says Rob Jackson.
Nuclear waste must be moved to dry-cast storage, which "is probably safe for tens of hundreds of years but shouldn’t be considered a final solution," says Rod Ewing .
"There is something just intrinsically terrifying about these big wildfires ... The wildfires are kind of the iconic representation of climate change impacts," says Chris Field.
"The fact that the influence of global warming can now be seen in the daily weather around the world ... is another clear sign of how strong the signal of climate change has become," says Noah Diffenbaugh.
“Not only have the emissions decreased, but the damages – the health damages – from those emissions have decreased very rapidly, more than 20% over the course of six years,” says Inês Azevedo.
"At the margin, we're seeing that the damages from air pollution provided by farms are larger than the marginal value that the farms provide in economic terms," says Inês Azevedo.
“It’s a simple way of illustrating that the atmosphere has a finite capability to hold greenhouse gasses before bad things happen,” says Rob Jackson, who helped to create the graphic.
The world's oldest trees, like those at Cairo, have a big effect on the ancient climate though weathering that causes chemical reactions, says Kevin Boyce.
“One of the reasons we’re studying Thwaites Glacier is because of its shape,” says Dustin Schroeder, adding that like the Antarctic ice sheets themselves, the massive glacier could have been a big contributor to sea level rise in the past.
Rob Jackson speaks about the Global Carbon Project, which projects that global carbon dioxide emissions from coal, oil and natural gas are set to hit another record high this year.
"I am, I have to confess, not very optimistic that in a five-to-year timescale, we'll see a peak in emissions," says Rob Jackson about the continued rise in carbon emissions. "I hope I'm wrong. I really hope I'm wrong."
Natural gas use is surging across the world and fossil fuel emissions are hitting records that are unsustainable for the planet. "Any growth is more than we can afford right now,” says Rob Jackson. “What we need is for emissions to stabilize and drop.”
Mathieu Lapôtre's research helps quantify how vegetation influences river mobility and proposes a new theory on how river movement may have influenced ancient Earth’s climate.
