Library

Welcome to Climanosco’s library, an ever-growing collection on all things climate science.

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Community membership as a driver of climate action: From rural hunters to progressive activists

Jessica Love-Nichols, Julia Coombs Fine, Delcia Orona, Forest Ophelia Stuart, Rohit Reddy Karnaty and Shawn Van Valkenburgh

In this paper we show how community membership can motivate climate activism in two very different contexts: for politically conservative hunters and fishers in the western United States, and for progressive climate activists in the US and UK. In the first context, we describe how members of the right-wing hunting community emphasize their collective identity through shared ways of communicating, …

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Human reactions to climate change: a social psychological perspective

Rusi Jaspal and Brigitte Nerlich

Climate change is a significant global challenge but also a controversial topic. In this article, we present an integrative theoretical framework and discuss the social psychological aspects of climate change, focusing on how it is communicated and understood, and how people respond to it. First, we focus on linguistic constructions of climate change and its mitigation measures, drawing on tenets …

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Sea level under climate change: Understanding the links between the past and the future

Keven Roy, Nicole S. Khan, Timothy A. Shaw, Robert E. Kopp and Benjamin P. Horton

Rising global sea level, a consequence of climate change, results from an increase in the world ocean’s water volume and mass. Recent climate warming is responsible for producing the highest rate of global average sea-level rise of the past few millennia, and this rate will accelerate through the 21st century and beyond, exposing low-lying islands and coastal regions to significant …

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Will climate change worsen your health?

Joan Ballester

Nearly 8% of deaths in Europe are due to ambient temperatures, and global warming represents an additional threat for public health. Despite the fact that we expect more frequent, intense and persistent heat waves during the present century, it is actually not clear whether the number of attributable deaths will also increase. Here I discuss why the role of early …

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The impact of climate change will hit urban dwellers first – Can green infrastructure save us?

Rüdiger Grote

Two phenomena that can cause large numbers of premature human deaths have gained attention in the last years: heat waves and air pollution. These two effects have two things in common: They are closely related to climate change and they are particularly intense in urban areas. Urban areas are particular susceptible to these impacts because they can store lots of …

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Increasing heat creates hardship for brick kiln workers in Chennai, India and the alternative pathways reducing it

Karin Lundgren Kownacki, Siri M. Kjellberg, Pernille Goosh, Marwa Dabaieh and Vidhya Venugopal

Climate change brings new burdens to people working outdoors. Migrant populations working at brick kilns in India are one such group facing dangerously overheated working conditions. Many migrate to the kilns from rural areas under bonded labor conditions. We argue that solutions need to go beyond industry-oriented technology-based solutions and focus on the social problem and take a people focused …

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Choose you own scientific experiment: Triggering debris flows and flash floods

Thea Turkington

Landslides and flash floods result in many fatalities around the globe. Understanding what triggers these events is therefore vital, although how to approach this problem is not straight forward. After background information for the experiment and some guidelines, two options are presented to learn more about the triggers of debris flows: (A) using rainfall or (B) the atmospheric conditions. You …

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Can somebody clear the air? How air quality and climate change are connected.

Erika von Schneidemesser

Air pollution and climate change are different phenomena, but are connected in a number of ways. The same sources emit both air pollutants and greenhouse gases, many air pollutants affect the Earth’s energy balance and thereby affect climate change, and a changing climate will affect air quality. Policy options to address either air quality or climate change cannot be formulated …

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What do historical temperature records tell us about natural variability in global temperature?

Patrick T Brown

Global average surface air temperature can change when it is either ‘forced’ to change by factors such as increasing greenhouse gasses, or it can change on its own through ‘unforced’ natural cycles like El-Niño/La-Niña. In this paper we estimated the magnitude of unforced temperature variability using historical datasets rather than the more commonly used computer climate models. We used data …

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Are humans to blame for the heat experienced in Geneva in the summer of 2015?

Oliver Angelil

Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, humans have been changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere by burning fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas. These gases are known to scientists as “greenhouse-gases”. Greenhouse-gases are vital to sustain life on Earth, but rapidly increasing concentrations of them can have catastrophic consequences. The word ‘catastrophic’ is perfectly fitting here, …

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Global warming might be on hold, but it’s not cancelled

Iselin Medhaug

Instrumental measurements of surface temperatures are available back to around 1850. Based on these, we can estimate the annual mean global temperature. Global temperatures are clearly rising, mainly because of increasing amounts of greenhouse gases, like for example CO2 and methane, from use of coal, oil and gas and deforestation. Since 1998, a paradox seems to have appeared, where the …

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