Related papers: Pathways to Sustainable Planetary Science
We compare the performance of a recently proposed empirical climate model based on astronomical harmonics against all available general circulation climate models (GCM) used by the IPCC (2007) to interpret the 20th century global surface…
Climate change has become one of the biggest global problems increasingly compromising the Earth's habitability. Recent developments such as the extraordinary heat waves in California & Canada, and the devastating floods in Germany point to…
The carbon footprint share of the information and communication technology (ICT) sector has steadily increased in the past decade and is predicted to make up as much as 23 \% of global emissions in 2030. This shows a pressing need for…
The climate system's nonlinear dynamics is influenced by various external forcings and internal feedbacks that can give rise to regional and even global tipping points that may lead to significant and potentially irreversible changes.…
A set of idealized experiments are performed to analyze the competing effects of declining atmospheric CO2 concentrations, the opening of an ocean gateway, and varying orbital parameters. These forcing mechanisms, which influence the global…
For astronomers to make a significant contribution to the reduction of climate change-inducing greenhouse gas emissions, we first must quantify our sources of emissions and review the most effective approaches for reducing them. Here we…
Earth will become uninhabitable within 2-3 Gyr as a result of the moving boundaries of the habitable zone caused by the increasing luminosity of the Sun. Predictions about the future of habitable conditions on Earth include a decline in…
MEDEAS (Modelling the Energy Development under Environmental And Socioeconomic constraint) World is a new global-aggregated energy-economy-environmental model, which runs from 1995 to 2050. In this work, we tested the MEDEAS world model to…
Ambitious scenarios of carbon emission redistribution for mitigating climate change in line with the Paris Agreement and reaching the sustainable development goal of eradicating poverty have been proposed recently. They imply a strong…
Economists have predicted that damages from global warming will be as low as 2.1% of global economic production for a 3$^\circ$C rise in global average surface temperature, and 7.9% for a 6$^\circ$C rise. Such relatively trivial estimates…
Increasing greenhouse gases will change many aspects of the Earth's climate, from its annual mean to the frequency of extremes such as heat waves and droughts. Here we report that the current generation of climate models predicts a delay in…
Human-induced carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, primarily from fossil fuel combustion and changes in land use and land cover (LULCC), are a key contributor to climate change. As the climate warms, extreme events such as heatwaves, droughts,…
Our present-day atmosphere is often used as an analog for potentially habitable exoplanets, but Earth's atmosphere has changed dramatically throughout its 4.5 billion year history. For example, molecular oxygen is abundant in the atmosphere…
Conventionally, a habitable planet is one that can support liquid water on its surface. Habitability depends on temperature, which is set by insolation and the greenhouse effect, due mainly to CO2 and water vapor. The CO2 level is increased…
Deploying hydrogen technologies is one option to reduce energy carbon dioxide emissions, but recent studies have called attention to the indirect climate implications of fugitive hydrogen emissions. We find that biases in hydroxyl (OH)…
Numerical climate models are used to project future climate change due to both anthropogenic and natural causes. Differences between projections from different climate models are a major source of uncertainty about future climate. Emergent…
As organizations face increasing pressure to understand their corporate and products' carbon footprints, artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted calculation systems for footprinting are proliferating, but with widely varying levels of rigor…
The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence has significantly increased the electricity, water, and carbon demands of modern data centers, raising sustainability concerns. This study evaluates the environmental footprint of AI server…
In 2023, the global mean temperature soared to 1.48K above the pre-industrial level, surpassing the previous record by 0.17K. Previous best-guess estimates of known drivers including anthropogenic warming and the El Nino onset fall short by…
Generative AI is spreading rapidly, creating significant social and economic value while also raising concerns about its high energy use and environmental sustainability. While prior studies have predominantly focused on the…