In the last few years it has become a common practice to compensate carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by planting trees. This idea is simple and rooted on a very basic principle: trees get the energy of sunlight, and by photosynthesis they take water from the ground and CO2 from the air, releasing oxygen in the atmosphere. The CO2 is then stored in trees and surrounding soil. Tree planting efforts ar ...[Read More]
While a previous blog entry dealt with the question whether we can use lessons from the nonlinear nature of climate for projections of the Covid-19 pandemic, there is now a first example of how the pandemic can teach us something on climate. The several weeks long lockdown of China made February 2020 an exceptional month in terms of air quality; aerosol emissions were tremendously reduced leading ...[Read More]
Autumn is hurricane season in the north tropics and indeed 2019 does not make exception from this point of view. After Dorian hitting Bahamas and North Carolina, the American National Hurricane Center named Lorenzo a tropical depression originating near Capo Verde. On September 25th Lorenzo became a category 1 hurricane, according to the Saffir-Simpson scale. This scale categorizes the hurricanes ...[Read More]
If August Rodin had lived nowadays, he would have placed his gates of hell (la Porte de l’Enfer) in Gallargues-le-Montueux, where the absolute French temperature record (45.9 °C) was set on June 28th this year. The last week of June has been very hot, not only in the south of France, but overall central Europe: in the Alps, some locations such as Chamonix (France) and Aosta (Italy) experienced tem ...[Read More]
