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The clock is ticking for climate change mitigation. Geoengineering is gaining ground as an option, but it needs to be examined at a large scale to determine its effectiveness and associated risks.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is preparing a report on keeping global warming below 1.5 °C. How the panel chooses to deal with the option of solar geoengineering will test the integrity of scientific climate policy advice.
Despite much emphasis on diversity in the US, geoscience remains one of the least diverse scientific disciplines. If we want to achieve and maintain diversity, we need to make our work environments welcoming to a broad spectrum of voices.
To keep global warming below 2 °C, countries need long-term strategies for low-emission development. Without these, immediate emissions reductions may lock-in high-emitting infrastructure, hamper collaboration and make climate goals unachievable.
Communities around the Arctic are already seeing the effects of melting permafrost. Some of the biggest effects of this thaw will probably emerge in the coming centuries.
Forests are important for the global carbon cycle, and for mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. However, the role forests play in carbon sequestration should not eclipse everything else we value them for.
Slowing GDP growth, a structural shift away from heavy industry, and more proactive policies on air pollution and clean energy have caused China's coal use to peak. It seems that economic growth has decoupled from growth in coal consumption.
The ocean overturning circulation is potentially sensitive to climate change. In the north and south alike, human influence is less pronounced than we thought, but that is no reason to relax our watchfulness.
After more than a decade exploring Saturn and its moons, the Cassini mission is in its closing act. Cassini's last year is an encore performance stuffed with science, including a final plunge into Saturn's atmosphere.
The New Horizons mission has revealed Pluto and its moon Charon to be geologically active worlds. The familiar, yet exotic, landforms suggest that geologic processes operate similarly across the Solar System, even in its cold outer reaches.
Billions of years ago, high atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations were vital to life's tenuous foothold on Earth. Despite new constraints, the composition and evolution of Earth's early atmosphere remains hazy.
Investigations of sexual harassment are difficult and potentially destructive to all involved. It is imperative that they are carried out quickly, with high priority and acted upon decisively where misconduct is identified.
The Paris Agreement introduced three mitigation targets. In the future, the main focus should not be on temperature targets such as 2 or 1.5 °C, but on the target with the greatest potential to effectively guide policy: net zero emissions.
