Only a few weeks ago, massive precipitation produced by the storm “Boris” led to chaos and flooding in Central and Eastern Europe. An analysis conducted by the Alfred Wegener Institute shows that in a world without the current level of global warming Boris would have deposited roughly nine percent less rain. Such conclusions can be drawn thanks to a new modelling approach called ‘storylines’. How it can be used in near-real-time was just presented in the Nature journal Communications Earth & Environment. At the same time, the AWI team released a freely available online tool that allows users to identify the fingerprints of climate change in current extreme weather events and create their own comparison graphics.

Osaka Metropolitan University researchers have discovered that the combination of green algae and yeast enhances the efficiency of wastewater treatment.

A new study has exposed for the first time how inhabitants of the smallest countries globally, contributing least to climate change, already bear the brunt of its devastating consequences and the burden is likely to worsen.

Tree planting has been widely touted as a cost-effective way of reducing global warming, due to trees’ ability to store large quantities of carbon from the atmosphere. But, writing in the journal Nature Geoscience, an international group of scientists argue that tree planting at high latitudes will accelerate, rather than decelerate, global warming. Why? Because soils in the Arctic and Subarctic store immense amounts of carbon that may be relased into the atmosphere when disturbed, and the trees will soak up more heat from the sun than white snow.