Atmospheric Sciences

GeoPolicy: What does the IPCC’s 6th Assessment Report tell us about the future?

Chloe Hill August 27, 2021

Boreal forest fire in Canada. Credit: Stefan Doerr, distributed via Imaggeo

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) prepares and publishes extensive Assessment Reports on the scientific, technical and socio-economic knowledge on climate change, including its impacts, future risks, and likely scenarios based on the actions that humanity takes. In their sixth Assessment Report (AR6), the IPCC’s certainty and warnings were clearer than ever. This month’s GeoPoli ...[Read More]

GeoPolicy: Atmospheric Sciences and Climate: Past, Present & Future Divisions welcome the US back into the Paris Climate Agreement

Chloe Hill March 3, 2021

Climate change is in our hands. Credit: Stephanie Flude. Distributed via Imaggeo

As of 19 February 2021, the US officially re-joined the Paris Climate Agreement, a landmark international accord to limit global warming by 2°C (and ideally to 1.5°C) compared to pre-industrial levels. The Paris Climate Agreement aims to bring the world together to avoid catastrophic warming that will impact us all and to build resilience to the consequences of climate change that we are already s ...[Read More]

Winners of the EGU Best Blog Posts of 2020 Competition

Hazel Gibson February 5, 2021

2020 was a brilliant year for our blogging network here at EGU. Across the EGU’s official blog, GeoLog, as well as the network and division blogs there were so many interesting, educational and just downright entertaining posts this year it was hard to get the blog editors to choose their favourites! Nevertheless at the beginning of January, to celebrate the excellent display of science writing ac ...[Read More]

120 years of the ‘Greenhouse Effect’

Hazel Gibson January 27, 2021

The dark side of the big city. Credit: Vyacheslav Nizovtsev (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu)

120 years ago in 1901, Swedish meteorologist Nils Ekholm used the term ‘greenhouse’ to describe the heating effect that a planet’s atmosphere has on the surface temperature of the planet, the first time that this now much-used and abused metaphor was published. He wrote: “The atmosphere plays a very important part of a double character as to the temperature at the earth’s surface, of which the one ...[Read More]