Climate Change

Potent, climate-warming gases are being emitted into the atmosphere but are not being recorded in official inventories, a BBC investigation has found....Among the key provisions of the Paris climate deal, signed by 195 countries in December 2015, is the requirement that every country, rich or poor, has to submit an inventory of its greenhouse-gas emissions every two years. Under UN rules, most countries produce "bottom-up" records, based on how many car journeys are made or how much energy is used for heating homes and offices.

To slow climate change, lawmakers in a handful of states are proposing bills or passing laws that convert their local electricity grids to renewable sources. ...

Fellow Kelly Levin says the process of opposing red and blue teams — the consensus on one side with an equal number of opponents on the other — might work well to encourage new ideas and test the strength of existing ideas but has no place in determining the science of a changing climate.

Fellow Sarah Myhre writes on what it means to her to be a trusted public source of information on climate change. She writes "you cannot just be a content expert. You must also be a person. To earn trust in the public eye, you have to disclose your conflicts of interest. You must embrace transparency. You must articulate the limits of your expertise. You must come to see the line separating evidence and your own ideology."

Fellow Jason Grumet appeared on a PBS News Hour segment that dug into President Trump's reasons why he thought the Paris climate accord was a bad idea. Watch the segment on YouTube

The March for Science has come and gone, but the team that sparked the movement still hasn't taken a breather. “I thought that after the march I would get back to my day job, but that’s not what happened,” said Fellow Ayana Johnson, a marine biologist and ocean conservation consultant who served as co-director of partnerships for the event.

Reducing the complexity of research on ocean ecosystems does not mean dumbing down your science, it means delivering science in a series of short chapters. If you can get the readers hooked, and don’t confuse them, you can tell a complex story. But that takes work and training that many scientists don’t have, writes Fellow Linwood Pendleton.

Fellow Ayana Johnson, one of the co-leaders of the March for Science in April 2017, writes in Scientific American that the anti-science stance of the current administration—silencing scientists, removing data from federal websites, proposing drastic funding cuts—hits her core.

Researchers have revealed that declining plant diversity — from habitat loss, human use, and other environmental pressures — causes plants to flower earlier, and that the effects of diversity loss on the timing of flowering are similar in magnitude to the effects of global warming. The finding could have a powerful influence on the way scientists study ecosystem changes and measure the effects of global warming. Read more