Latest Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research Stories
As they typically result from severe external perturbations, it is of vital interest how stable the most desirable state is. Surprisingly, this basic question has so far received little attention. Now scientists of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), in a paper published in Nature Physics, propose a new concept for quantifying stability. "Up to now, science was able to say if a complex system is stable or not, but it wasn't able to properly say how stable it is," says...
Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online India’s monsoons are a godsend for the country’s vital agricultural sector, providing life for crops which more than a billion people rely on. But a grim forecast for the future may spell doom for the nation’s food production and economy, as summer rains will be more sparse over the next few hundred years due to global warming. A new study by researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Potsdam...
Instead, researchers were able to pin down a number of factors explaining the pronounced imbalances between emission importers and exporters, the US current account deficit being one of them. Their conclusion: interventions in world trade, like CO2 tariffs, would probably have only a small impact on global emissions. Steadily growing world trade leads – as earlier research has shown – to a substantial transfer of CO2 from one country to another. The traded goods effectively contain the...
The past decade has been one of unprecedented weather extremes. Scientists of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Germany argue that the high incidence of extremes is not merely accidental. From the many single events a pattern emerges. At least for extreme rainfall and heat waves the link with human-caused global warming is clear, the scientists show in a new analysis of scientific evidence in the journal Nature Climate Change. Less clear is the link between warming...
The Greenland ice sheet is likely to be more vulnerable to global warming than previously thought. The temperature threshold for melting the ice sheet completely is in the range of 0.8 to 3.2 degrees Celsius global warming, with a best estimate of 1.6 degrees above pre-industrial levels, shows a new study by scientists from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Today, already 0.8 degrees global warming has been observed. Substantial...
German and Spanish researchers have discovered that the Greenland ice sheet may be more vulnerable to the effects of global climate change than initially thought, and that temperatures may not have to rise much more before it could be lost for good. According to Bloomberg reporter Alex Morales, scientists at the Complutense University in Madrid (UCM) and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) are reporting that the ice sheet could lose its ability to grow if the global...
To cost-effectively protect the climate, not only an emissions trading scheme but also financial support for new technologies is needed. Economising on targeted funding, for example for renewable energies, makes climate protection more expensive – as scientists of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) now calculated for the first time, using a complex computer simulation that spans the entire 21st century. Without funding, energy technologies with high cost reduction...
The loose framework and "unambitious" carbon-cutting pledges of the Copenhagen accord means that the treaty will more than likely fail to reach its target of limiting global warming to just 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), claim Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) members.In an opinion piece published Wednesday in the online journal Nature, PIK researchers Joeri Rogelj, Malte Meinshausen, and their colleagues say that it is more likely that the average...
COPENHAGEN, December 16 /PRNewswire/ -- Today Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) launch A Copenhagen Prognosis: towards a safe climate future, a synthesis of the latest science on climate change, environment and development. The Prognosis will be launched at a press conference at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP 15) on Wednesday 16 December at 19:30. Copies will be...
