Persistent contrails are an important climate impact of aviation which could potentially be reduced by re-routing aircraft to avoid contrailing; however this generally increases both the flight length and its corresponding CO$_{2}$ emissions. Here, we provide a simple framework to assess the trade-off between the climate impact of CO2 emissions and contrails for a single flight, in terms of the absolute global warming potential and absolute global temperature potential metrics for time horizons of 20, 50 and 100 years.

Glacier ecosystems are a significant source of bioavailable, yet ancient dissolved organic carbon (DOC). Characterizing DOC in Mendenhall Glacier outflow (southeast Alaska) the researchers document a seasonal persistence to the radiocarbon-depleted signature of DOC, highlighting ancient DOC as a ubiquitous feature of glacier outflow.

Emissions of gases and particles from the combustion of fossil fuels and biofuels in Africa are expected to increase significantly in the near future due to the rapid growth of African cities and megacities. There is currently no regional emissions inventory that provides estimates of anthropogenic combustion for the African continent. This work provides a quantification of the evolution of African combustion emissions from 2005 to 2030, using a bottom-up method.

The threat of intense tropical cyclones (TCs) to East Asia has increased in recent decades. Integrated analyses of five available TC data sets for the period 1977–2010 revealed that the growing threat of TCs primarily results from the significant shift that the spatial positions of the maximum intensity of TCs moved closer to East Asian coastlines from Vietnam to Japan. This shift incurs a robust increase in landfall intensity over east China, Korea and Japan.

Recent investments in the transit sector to address greenhouse gas emissions have concentrated on purchasing efficient replacement vehicles and inducing mode shift from the private automobile. There has been little focus on the potential of network and operational improvements, such as changes in headways, route spacing, and stop spacing, to reduce transit emissions. Most models of transit system design consider user and agency cost while ignoring emissions and the potential environmental benefit of operational improvements.

While the international community aims to limit global warming to below 2

Mean global warming of 2 degrees, the target set by the international community, is projected to expose an additional 8 percent of humankind to new or increased water scarcity says this new study published by scientists of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in the journal "Environmental Research Letters".

Climatic warming of about 0.5 ° C in the global mean since the 1970s has strongly increased the occurrence-probability of heat extremes on monthly to seasonal time scales. For the 21st century, climate models predict more substantial warming. Here we show that the multi-model mean of the CMIP5 (Coupled Model Intercomparison Project) climate models accurately reproduces the evolution over time and spatial patterns of the historically observed increase in monthly heat extremes.

2.1 million deaths from the effects of air pollution occur each year across the globe finds this study published in the latest edition of journal Environmental Research Letters by Raquel A Silva & et al.

Increased concentrations of ozone and fine particulate matter (PM2.5) since preindustrial times reflect increased emissions, but also contributions of past climate change. Here we use modeled concentrations from an ensemble of chemistry–climate models to estimate the global burden of anthropogenic outdoor air pollution on present-day premature human mortality, and the component of that burden attributable to past climate change.