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Major shift in UK land use needed to deliver Net Zero emissions

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23 January 2020 The UK has committed to becoming a Net Zero economy by 2050. Meeting that goal requires a transformation in land use across the UK. Government must confront the rapid changes that are now needed, the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) says in its first ever in-depth advice on UK agricultural policies. In...

Even 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted global warming

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Sciencemag.org  December 2019 Climate change doubters have a favorite target: climate models. They claim that computer simulations conducted decades ago didn’t accurately predict current warming, so the public should be wary of the predictive power of newer models. Now, the most sweeping evaluation of these older models—some half a century old—shows most of them were...

Climate change: Warming signal links global floods and fires

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BBC News Nov 2019 With homes under water in South Yorkshire, near record flooding in Venice, and burgeoning wildfires in Australia, many people are asking if and how climate change is connected to these extreme weather events. "Sea level rise is rising globally and it is also rising in the Adriatic," said Prof Gabi Hegerl,...

Earth warming more quickly than thought, new climate models show

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Article in The Peninsular Qatar September 2019 By 2100, average temperatures could rise 7.0 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels if carbon emissions continue unabated, separate models from two leading research centres in France showed. "The French modelling groups are to be congratulated for being the first to complete their simulations," said Piers Forster, director of...

Can we reach 100 percent renewable energy in time to avert climate catastrophe?

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In this article in August 2019 Chris Smith, SMURPHS researcher discussed his opinions on how to prevent the worst climate scenarios, carbon emissions must be slashed to net-zero by 2050 “I think this transition [to renewables] will happen,” said Chris Smith, a research fellow in physical climate change at the University of Leeds, England. “The...

A new approach for understanding the remaining carbon budget

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Published in Carbon Brief The concept of a “carbon budget” has proved to be both elegantly simple and stubbornly complicated. The theory dictates that the total amount of CO2 emitted until emissions are taken down to zero determines the maximum warming that the world will subsequently experience. This was the promise from a series of...

The Climate Press

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Leeds PhD students Paloma Trascasa-Castro (SMURPHS) and Bianca van Bavel have created this online platform to share science-based articles, news about climate and nature and interviews with scientists and researchers. Bridging the gap between the scientific and the non-scientific community, because every person, independently to their education, has the right to be informed and up to...

CCC Net Zero – The UK’s contribution to stopping global warming

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SMURPHS PI Piers Forster co authored the Net Zero report, released on the 2nd May 2019 by the Committee for Climate Change in the UK. This report responds to a request from the Governments of the UK, Wales and Scotland, asking the Committee to reassess the UK’s long-term emissions targets. Our new emissions scenarios draw...

Climate change means more extreme weather-here's what the UK can expect if emissions keep increasing

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On a global scale the science is settled: human emissions of greenhouse gases have already led to a rise in global temperature of more than 1°C, and the consequences are visible around the world. Already, in 2019, Australia has sweltered in record-breaking heat, while the US Midwest was hit by freezing conditions colder than Antarctica. In the UK meanwhile, winter...

Immediate phase out of fossil fuels could keep warming below 1.5C

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Despite some positive climate action, new fossil fuel infrastructure is still being built and deployed. Dozens of new coal power plants are currently planned or under construction, for instance, while petrol car sales will nearly hit 100m in 2019. But what if all that ceased tomorrow? It turns out that if we built no more fossil fuel infrastructure...