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01/06/2023 - In a ranking of climate science papers most referred to in news and social media, no less than 3 out of the top 10 papers feature authors from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). The ranking is published by the renowned 'Carbon Brief' newsletter and is based on the papers' so-called Altmetric score. While this metric is certainly not perfect, it is a good indicator to help assess public perception of climate science publications.

01/26/2023 - While the Amazon rainforest and the Tibetan Plateau sit on different sides of the globe, scientists now discovered that changes in the South American ecosystem can trigger changes in the vicinity of the Himalayas. Both are tipping elements, hence large-scale elements of the planetary machinery that are sensitive to global warming and may shift abruptly and often irreversibly from one state to another at specific thresholds. A new study applies the theory of complex networks to these elements and finds surprising – and worrying – long-distance linkages.

03/07/2022 - The Amazon rainforest is likely losing resilience, data analysis from high-resolution satellite images suggests. Resilience loss in pristine parts of the rainforest is mainly due to stress from nearby human activity, such as logging and slash-and-burn. The influence of human-caused climate change is not clearly determinable so far, but will likely matter greatly in the future. For about three quarters of the forest, the ability to recover from perturbation has been decreasing since the early 2000s, which the scientists see as a warning sign. The new evidence is derived from advanced statistical analysis of satellite data of changes in vegetation biomass.

12/20/2022 - An international team of Earth scientists has discovered that the atmosphere contained far less CO2 than previously thought when forests emerged on our planet. The study published in Nature Communications alters a 30-year-old paradigm with important implications for understanding how land plants affect the climate.

12/12/2022 - European forests are increasingly affected by natural disturbances, a new monitoring study shows - and climate change is likely exacerbating this, according to the results of an international team of scientists.