articles

Well, well, well… what have we here? Favorable conditions for El Niño to develop?

For decades, biologists have believed a key enzyme in plants had one function—produce amino acids, which are vital to plant survival and also essential to human diets.

The sultry summer months along the Gulf Coast and East Coast are a time of volatile weather as warm ocean water fuels storms, some just bringing rain and some growing into fierce tropical storms and hurricanes.

A massive world-wide study of dry riverbeds has found they’re contributing more carbon emissions than previously thought, and this could help scientists better understand how to fight climate change.

Optimizing economic welfare without constraints might put human well-being at risk, a new climate study argues. While being successful in bringing down costs of greenhouse gas reductions for instance, the concept of profit maximization alone does not suffice to avoid the tipping of critical elements in the Earth system which could lead to dramatic changes of our livelihood. The scientists use mathematical experiments to compare economic optimization to the governance concepts of sustainability and the more recent approach of a safe operating space for humanity. All of these turn out to have their benefits and deficits, yet the profit-maximizing approach shows the greatest likelihood of producing outcomes that harm people or the environment.