Vast releases of gas, along with future ‘methane bombs’, represent huge threat – but curbing emissions would rapidly reduce global heating
More than 1,000 “super-emitter” sites gushed the potent greenhouse gas methane into the global atmosphere in 2022, the Guardian can reveal, mostly from oil and gas facilities. The worst single leak spewed the pollution at a rate equivalent to 67m running cars.
Sea ice helps protect glaciers and ice caps that would cause massive sea level rise when lost, scientists warn
The area of sea ice around Antarctica has hit a record low, with scientists reporting “never having seen such an extreme situation before”. The ice extent is expected to shrink even further before this year’s summer melting season ends.
The last three years were objectively hot, numbering among the warmest since records began in 1880. But the scorch factor of recent years was actually tempered by a climate pattern that slightly cools the globe, “La Niña.”
David Spratt is research director for the Melbourne-based Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration and coauthor of the book Climate Code Red: The Case for Emergency Action (Scribe, 2008). He published “What Lies Beneath: The Underestimation of Existential Climate Risk” with Ian Dunlop in 2018.
Electric utilities are likely responsible for the nation’s higher than expected emissions of sulfur hexafluoride, a greenhouse gas 25,000 times worse for the climate than carbon dioxide.
While emissions of sulfur hexafluoride (SF6), the world’s most potent greenhouse gas, have fallen sharply in the U.S. in recent decades, actual emissions are significantly higher than the official government estimates, a new study concludes.
For climate activists, the term “Exxon Knew” has settled deeply into the lexicon of climate accountability, shorthand for the contradiction between the oil giant’s long campaign to publicly question climate science and its internal understanding that the science was sound.
Now, new academic research lends statistical rigor to this concept by showing that the company’s own climate projections, dating back decades, consistently predicted the warming that was to come primarily from burning fossil fuels.
Greenland's glaciers are melting 100 times faster than previously calculated, according to a new model that takes into account the unique interaction between ice and water at the island’s fjords.
