climate

A flood of attention: extreme weather and digital media

Tim Middleton May 2, 2018

Seine river flooding near the Eiffel Tower in 2016. (Image Credit: Guilhem Vellut, Wikimedia Commons)

In June 2016, Paris was transformed. The River Seine burst its banks, submerging some of the nearby roads; floodwater lapped at the tops of street lamps and traffic lights. The event marked the the worst flooding in Paris for more than 30 years. When a flood event hits a major city, numerous researchers are keen to collect data for their work. However, Rosa Vicari, a PhD student at the the École d ...[Read More]

GeoPolicy: COP23 – key updates and outcomes

Chloe Hill November 17, 2017

Rwanda's Delegation to the COP23 UN Climate Talks in Bonn, Germany. Credit: Ministry of Environment - Rwanda (distributed via Flickr).

What is COP23? Anthropogenic climate change is threatening life on this planet as we know it. It’s a global issue… and not one that is easily solved. The Conference of the Parties (COP) provides world leaders, policy workers, scientists and industry leaders with the space to share ideas and decide on how to tackle climate change and generate global transformative change. COP23 will predominantly f ...[Read More]

How certain plants survive mass extinction events: study

Conor Purcell October 11, 2017

How do plants survive mass extinctions? . Credit: Marta Galvagno (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu).

We often read about Earth’s mass extinction events and how they wiped out vast numbers of animal species, leaving survivors to evolve and repopulate the planet. But it’s rarer to hear about how plants managed these catastrophes. A new study published last month by a team at University College Dublin, Ireland, in the journal Nature Plants shows how plants with thicker, heavier leaves we ...[Read More]

GeoPolicy: IPCC decides on fresh approach for next major report

Sarah Connors September 27, 2017

Opening session at the 46th IPCC Plenary, Montreal, Canada. Credit: Mike Muzurakis (distributed via IISD/ENB).

This month’s GeoPolicy post is a guest post from Sarah Connors, a Science Officer in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group 1 Technical Support Unit (and former EGU Science Policy Officer). The IPCC is starting its sixth cycle, in which hundreds of scientists take stock of the world’s climate change knowledge by assessing the current scientific literature and then summa ...[Read More]