Science Media Centre

The environment watchdog has proposed that New Zealand should follow the UK by putting climate change action into law. In her report Stepping stones to Paris and beyond, Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, Dr Jan Wright advises the Government to start thinking decades ahead to tackle climate change, and to put specific plans for how we […]

Burning the Earth’s remaining fossil fuels could lead to a bigger global temperature increase than expected, a new study finds. If we were to use up all of our planet’s fossil fuel resources, we’d increase the global average temperature by about 8°C globally by 2300, Canadian scientists report in Nature Climate Change. The scientists say […]

In the wake of new research suggesting that we might be heading into a mini ice-age, media outlets have dug deeper into the science. The study, presented at the UK National Astronomy Meeting this month, outlined a new model of solar activity which was based on two separate internal cycles in the sun interacting. According […]

New Zealand is far from doing its “fair share” of climate action, with its climate plans rated as “inadequate” by an independent international analysis: the Climate Action Tracker. “New Zealand’s climate target shows it’s far from doing its ‘fair share,’ and is anything but ambitious,” said Bill Hare, CEO and Senior Scientist at Climate Analytics, […]

A new comprehensive study, published in Science, tracks the impact of climate change on bumblebees, finding global warming is rapidly shrinking the area where these bees are found in both North America and Europe. Researchers examined more than 420,000 historical and current Northern Hemisphere records of many species of bumblebees–and confirm that the critical pollinators […]

The widely reported slowdown of global warming since the start of the millennium – often called the ‘hiatus’ –  is in fact a result of bad data, according to new research. The new study  from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, published today in Science,  presents an updated global surface temperature analysis. The results reveal […]

The year 2014 ranks as Earth’s warmest since 1880, according to two separate analyses by NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists. Since 1880, Earth’s average surface temperature has warmed by about 0.8 degrees Celsius, a trend that is largely driven by the increase in carbon dioxide and other human emissions into the […]

While 2014 was a near average year for New Zealand weather-wise, analysis of worldwide data has highlighted increasing global temperatures. According to the 2014 annual climate summary from NIWA, the nation-wide average temperature for 2014 was 12.8°C (0.2°C above the 1981-2010 annual average), making it the 23rd-warmest year since records began. The summary draws on […]

Technological fixes to combat harmful effects of climate change — even if employed on a massive scale — will be ineffective in the face of ever-increasing greenhouse gas emissions, new research suggests. A study from German researchers published this week in Nature Communications found no more than an 8% reduction in warming could result from […]

The ban on ozone-depleting CFCs, under the Montreal Protocol, may have contributed to the recent hiatus in global surface temperature increases, say international scientists. The researchers add that their findings, published today in Nature Geoscience, help to link human actions over the past century with changes in the rate of warming. The study is based […]