Will climate change affect frequency or intensity of El Niño and La Niña? There is still little consensus among scientists on this, explains the International Research Institute for Climate and Society’s Lisa Goddard.
Each of the last three decades was warmer than all earlier decades in the instrumental record, and each set a new and statistically significant record, culminating in the 2000s, which was the warmest decade of all.
This report presents a comprehensive appraisal of Earth’s climate in 2009, and establishes the last decade as the warmest on record. Reduced extent of Arctic sea ice, glacier volume, and snow cover reflect the effects of rising global temperature.
At the highest point atop the Greenland Ice Sheet, Matthew Shupe and his colleagues are installing a suite of climate and weather instruments. Their goal is to better understand the role of clouds in the rapid warming observed across the Arctic region.
Will ocean currents carry oil and byproducts from the Deepwater Horizon wellhead beyond the Gulf of Mexico and out into the open Atlantic Ocean? Climate data and computer models help scientists predict how and where.
This classroom resource is a combination of 3 visualizations and accompanying text that illustrate how 3 key natural phenomena - cyclical changes in solar energy output, major volcanic eruptions over the last century, and El Nino/Nina cycles - are insufficient to explain recent global warming.
In this activity, students explore past examples of climate variability in three locations: the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes, Central America, and coastal Greenland, and consider differences between climate variability and climate change.
In this activity, students use climate data to develop a simple graph of how climate has changed over time and then present the result in a blog, emphasizing effective science communication.
This series of visualizations show the annual Arctic sea ice minimum from 1979 to 2015. The decrease in Arctic sea ice over time is shown in an animation and a graph plotted simultaneously, but can be parsed so that the change in sea ice area can be shown without the graph.
