Research News

(Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK)) Climate change has impacts on forests, fields, rivers -- and thereby on humans that breathe, eat and drink. To assess these impacts more accurately, a comprehensive comparison of computer-based simulations from all over the world will start this week.

(DOE/US Department of Energy) Secretary of Energy Steven Chu announced today plans to launch a new Energy Innovation Hub for advanced research on batteries and energy storage with an investment of up to $120 million over five years.

(Earth System Science Partnership) More than 2,500 leading thinkers in a wide range of global change research areas will present new findings in climate change, environmental geo-engineering, international governance, the future of the oceans and biodiversity, global trade, development, poverty alleviation, food security and more.

(University of Pennsylvania) In a study of the harsh but beautiful White Sands National Monument in New Mexico, University of Pennsylvania researchers have uncovered a unifying mechanism to explain dune patterns.

(Ohio State University) More than extreme weather events and the work of scientists, it is national political leaders who influence how much Americans worry about the threat of climate change, new research finds.

(Springer) The researchers reveal that the driving factor that most influences public opinion on climate change is the mobilizing efforts of advocacy groups and elites. The study conducted an empirical analysis of the factors affecting US public concern about the threat of climate change between January 2002 and December 2010.

(Penn State) Some climate cooling caused by past volcanic eruptions may not be evident in tree-ring reconstructions of temperature change because large enough temperature drops lead to greatly shortened or even absent growing seasons, according to climate researchers, who compared tree-ring temperature reconstructions with model simulations of past temperature changes.

(University of Innsbruck) A new study shows that land-cover changes, in particular deforestation, in the vicinity of glaciers do not have an impact on glacier loss.

Around 250 million years ago, most life on Earth was wiped out in an extinction known as the "Great Dying." Geologists have learned that the end came slowly from thousands of centuries of volcanic activity.

(FECYT - Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology) A team of Spanish researchers have used different geological samples, extracted from the Enol lake in Asturias, to show that the Holocene, a period that started 11,600 years ago, did not have a climate as stable as was believed.