Far north of the Arctic Circle lies a fjord on the front lines of climate change. Geir Wing Gabrielsen has been visiting this inlet, located on the northwest side of the Norwegian archipelago Svalbard, since 1981, when he first came to study the behaviour of Arctic birds. It used to be that each year when … Read more
A NATO research vessel conducting studies of marine mammals in the Mediterranean Sea (pictured in 2009).Credit: U.S. Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Kristen Allen via Mil image/Alamy Science has been essential to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the political and military alliance founded 75 years ago this month. The 32-country alliance is admitting more … Read more
On 9 April, the European Court of Human Rights delivered a groundbreaking ruling: states are obliged to protect their citizens from the threats and harms of climate change. And in that regard, judges said, Switzerland’s climate action has been inadequate (see go.nature.com/4azjhvd). This marks the first time that an international human-rights court has linked protection … Read more
Climate litigation is in the spotlight again after a landmark decision last week. The top European human-rights court deemed that the Swiss government was violating its citizens’ human rights through its lack of climate action. The case, brought by more than 2,000 older women, is one of more than 2,300 climate lawsuits that have been … Read more
Climate change can cause anxiety — researchers need to work out when that requires specialist help.Credit: Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg/Getty Nearly one billion people worldwide — including one in seven teenagers — have a mental disorder. A growing body of research suggests that climate change is worsening people’s mental health and emotional well-being. Acute heatwaves, droughts, floods … Read more
Every year for six years, Laureen Wamaitha hoped that her fields in Kenya would flourish. Every year, she’d see drought wither the crops and then floods wash them away. The cycle of optimism and loss left her constantly anxious, and she blamed climate change. “You get to a situation where you have panic attacks because … Read more
Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here. As polar ice has melted and moved mass towards the Equator, it has slowed Earth’s rotation.Credit: Alessandro Dahan/Getty Melting ice caps are slowing the rotation of the Earth and could delay the next leap second by … Read more
Mountainous regions represent 25% of Earth’s land surface and are rich in biodiversity, owing in part to their steep climatic gradients and complex topography1,2. The assumption that mountain species are responding faster to anthropogenic climate change through rapid upward range shifts leading to potential mountaintop extinctions has attracted extensive research3,4,7,8,9. Whether species are closely tracking … Read more
Climate change is starting to alter how humans keep time. An analysis1 published in Nature on 27 March has predicted that melting ice caps are slowing Earth’s rotation to such an extent that the next leap second — the mechanism used since 1972 to reconcile official time from atomic clocks with that based on Earth’s … Read more
Climate scientist Tapio Schneider is delighted that machine learning has taken the drudgery out of his day. When he first started modelling how clouds form, more than a decade ago, this mostly involved painstakingly tweaking equations that describe how water droplets, air flow and temperature interact. But since 2017, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) … Read more