Climate change: the basics | Basisfakten über den Klimawandel
Our up-to-date collection of useful information sources in English and in German. Climate change is a reality that we can no longer run from. It’s here and it’s happening now, threatening our food supplies, our infrastructure, our health, and the fabrics of our societies. The idea of tackling such a large-scale problem can seem overwhelming. […]
2020 on Twitter – Was there a topic besides Covid19?
After the outstanding year 2019, attention for climate change on Twitter in the past year quickly dropped to the level from the years 2018 and before. The harsh decline directly coincides with the rising worldwide attention for the “new” Corona virus later named Covid19, which caused the global pandemic the world is still struggling with. […]
Negative emissions – a key assumption in limiting temperature rise
The application of “negative emissions” technology has been widely used by the IPCC and incorporated into models which predict the most modest estimates of limiting the global temperature rise to 2 degrees [2]. Bioenergy and Carbon Capture and Storage, commonly known under the acronym BECCS, is one such technology. In principle, it works by using […]
2019 on Twitter: Climate activism awakening
Shortly before 2020 is over, we will have a look back at 2019 to map the climate change debate as reflected transnationally on Twitter. Compared with the two years prior, 2019 showed a particular abundance of climate-related tweets: While the total tweets count of 2018 grew by 8% from 2017, the total count of 2019 grew by 70%. Then what triggered the climate discourse so much on Twitter that year?
What is a Climate Model?
Last August, our blogger Shorouk Elkobros explained what a climate model is in this video. One year later, climate models are still an essential tool for understanding global warming. In order to remind us how climate models work, Felix Schaumann has put together his own explanatory video.
Why we need airtravel for an accurate weather forecast
Flying is bad for the climate – this is an uncontested fact. However, air traffic is necessary for weather forecasts, as airplanes send live data to weather stations. COVID-19 has caused a massive decline in air travel, hereby affecting the quality of weather forecasts.
Let’s focus on the short-term benefits of long-term climate protection!
A new study by Samset et al. (2020) in Nature Communcations finds that even under strong and sustained mitigation efforts, it will take the climate system until mid-century to demonstrate a discernible cooling response. Unfortunately, we must accept and live with the frustrating fact that the global climate system is a rather gigantic tanker ship […]
Public opinion at a tipping point – Germany’s path to engaging with climate protection
As a follow-up on our Nature Climate Change study (Brüggemann et al. 2017) called “The appeasement effect of a United Nations climate summit on the German public”, we have now published a working paper tracing changes in public attitudes and behavioral intentions over a longer period of time. The paper compares data from our 2015, […]
Sustainable Lives: stage 2, here we go!
Besides having successfully finished the pilot studies and having initiated the working paper series, the project “Sustainable Lives” has also acquired new funding for the next two years. Our interdisciplinary work will continue in form of a working group at the Center for Sustainable Society Research (see our project website here).
Sustainable Lives: Preliminary findings from the first project stage
Since the “Food project” has now brought its first stage to a close, it is time to present some preliminary findings. With the funding provided by KNU, we have conducted a thorough interdisciplinary literature review and several pilot studies: a representative survey in sociology, experiments in economics, a qualitative and an automated content analysis in […]