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Earth's climate system is accumulating heat at an accelerating rate as human activity pushed global warming to 1.37 degrees Celsius last year, with the figure projected to surpass the Paris Agreement threshold of 1.5 degrees in about four years, strong and consistent evidence shows, researchers have said. Record-high greenhouse gas (GHG) levels, combined with a continued drop in sulphur aerosols -- thereby unmasking a part of the GHGs' warming effect -- are driving human-induced warming, which remains at an all-time high of around 0.27 degrees Celsius per decade, an international team of more than 70 scientists from 56 institutions across 17 countries, including the UK, the US, India and in Europe, said. There is evidence that carbon dioxide emission growth is slowing, but society needs to massively increase decarbonisation efforts during this critical decade, the researchers said. They added that the rate at which heat is accumulating in the Earth system suggests high levels of ...
Climate change could become the main driver of biodiversity decline by the mid-century, a new research has found. Studying changes in land-use patterns and their impacts on biodiversity, an international team of researchers found that biodiversity around the world could have declined by 2-11 per cent. "By including all world regions in our model, we were able to fill many blind spots and address criticism of other approaches working with fragmented and potentially biased data," said Henrique Pereira, research group head at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), and the first author of the study published in the journal 'Science'. Examining how biodiversity and ecosystems might evolve in the future, the researchers found that the combined effects of land-use change and climate change lead to biodiversity loss across all global regions, regardless of emissions scenario. "We found that climate change poses an imminent threat to biodiversity and ecosystem ...