Economists are warning that climate change isn’t just an environmental emergency, it could put a dent in global GDP.
A new study from the IMF, the University of Cambridge and the University of Southern California predicts that unless we slow down the effects of climate change, GDP per capita will drop significantly across the world.
Wildfires in the Arctic often burn far away from population centers, but their impacts are felt around the globe. From field and laboratory work to airborne campaigns and satellites, NASA is studying how climate change is contributing to more frequent and powerful boreal forest and Arctic fires and what that means for climate forecasting, ecosystems and human health.
The climate forcing from methane emissions since pre-industrial times has been 60% of that from CO2, meaning that methane has made a large contribution to observed warming over the past century. However, the climate impact of methane emissions is very different than that of CO2 emissions in terms of time scales, and this must be recognized when setting climate policy targets: use of a single climate metric to compare the effects of methane and CO2 emissions is not appropriate. An additional complication is that methane is emitted by a variety of sources, and there is large uncertainty in the contribution of different source regions and sectors to the overall methane budget. The recent decadal uptick in methane has generated much interest and is still unexplained. Satellites offer considerable potential for global monitoring of methane emissions, quantifying the contributions from different sources, detecting temporal variability, and attributing long-term trends. Atmospheric methane has been measured continuously from space since 2003, and new instruments have been recently launched or are planned for launch in the near future that will greatly expand the capabilities of space-based observations. I will discuss the value of these observations to better quantify and monitor methane emissions, from the global scale down to the scale of point sources.
