By Oliver Morrison, PublicSource, through the Institute for Nonprofit News network
As the climate crisis looms, cities have to deal with a lot of uncertainty: How much warmer will the Earth get as we emit more and more greenhouse gases? There is a range of possible answers. At the low end, the temperature rise is expected to cause massive disruptions but at a scale less damaging to humans. At the high end, there will likely be catastrophic change.
Pittsburgh researchers are looking at a variety of climate problems, including how to pull carbon dioxide directly from the air, how our infrastructure needs to adapt to increased rainfall and the difficulty of precisely measuring how much the Earth will warm.
One of the biggest obstacles to calculating exactly how much the Earth will warm is our limited understanding of clouds, according to Neil Donahue, the director of the Steinbrenner Institute at Carnegie Mellon University [CMU].
Read the rest of the story here at PublicSource.
This article is republished here through Great Lakes Now’s membership in the Institute for Nonprofit News, a network of more than 200 nonprofit newsrooms across the U.S., working to strengthen the sources of trusted news for thousands of diverse communities.
Featured Image: Katherine Hornbostel, an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh, simulates performing an experiment to extract carbon dioxide from ocean water. (Photo by Jay Manning/PublicSource Not Labeled for Reuse)
