UN report: Accelerated sea-level rise poses significant risk for Pacific Islands
08/28/2024 – A new UN brief outlines the current scientific understanding of sea-level rise on coastal flooding, with particular attention to major coastal cities in G20 countries and the Pacific Small Island Developing States. The projections underline that climate change threatens the lives and livelihoods especially of coastal communities. The brief was scientifically supported by Anders Levermann, researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
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From ocean currents to the energy transition: thousands visit PIK for Potsdam Science Day
05/04/2024 - Under the motto "Research. Discover. Join in.", the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), together with the other Telegrafenberg institutes, hosted this year's Potsdam Science Day. On the first Saturday in May 6,200 interested visitors came to find out about the work of researchers at PIK at information stands, lectures and hands-on experiments in the sunshine and spring-like temperatures.
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Girls' Day 2024 at PIK: Exciting insights into climate research
04/25/2024 - More than 15,000 options, around 135,000 spots available across Germany, more schoolgirls than ever before: this year's Girls' Day has set new records. At the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), 19 girls from Berlin and Brandenburg had the opportunity to take an exclusive look behind the scenes at the institute.
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Overview article - Is the Atlantic Overturning Circulation Approaching a Tipping Point?
04/11/2024 - Studies show that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) has already weakened as a result of anthropogenic climate change and is possible moving towards a tipping point. This current has a significant influence on climate, particularly in Europe. Stefan Rahmstorf, head of the Earth System Analysis research department at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), outlines the current state of research in a new overview article in the scientific journal Oceanography.
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Timely reversal of global warming could prevent Greenland ice sheet tipping
10/18/2023 - The Greenland ice sheet is likely to be more resistant to global warming than previously thought, finds a new study published in the scientific journal Nature. An international team of scientists shows that even if critical temperature thresholds are temporarily crossed by up to 6.5 degrees Celsius until 2100, a possible tipping of the ice sheet and therefore drastic sea level rise over hundreds of thousands of years could be prevented. To achieve this, measures to reduce greenhouse gases would have to be taken as quickly as possible following the critical rise in temperature, so that the temperature can be stabilized at no more than 1.5 degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels in the long term.
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Stability inspection for West Antarctica: marine ice sheet not destabilized yet, but possibly on tipping path
09/07/2023 - Antarctica’s vast ice masses seem far away, yet they store enough water to raise global sea levels by several meters. A team of experts from European research institutes has now provided the first systematic stability inspection of the ice sheet’s current state. Their diagnosis: While they found no indication of irreversible, self-reinforcing retreat of the ice sheet in West Antarctica yet, global warming to date could already be enough to trigger the slow but certain loss of ice over the next hundreds to thousands of years.
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Greenland’s Ice Sheet might be close to first tipping point
04/05/2023 - The Greenland Ice Sheet is likely to be halfway towards a tipping point whose crossing would imply extensive further melting, a new study finds. While humanity has emitted ca. 500 gigatons of carbon so far, with about 1000 gigatons of carbon much of the massive ice sheet will melt irreversibly, a team of scientists shows.
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Earlier, higher, smaller: Climate change alters glacial lake outburst floods
02/16/2023 - Due to global warming, flood-like water outbursts from ice-dammed glacial lakes worldwide happen earlier in the year and originate from higher areas. This is shown on the basis of observation data since 1900 by a new study with the participation of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), which is published in the scientific journal Nature. At the same time, however, these so-called outbursts are also becoming smaller.
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Major Atlantic ocean current system might be approaching critical threshold
08/05/2021 - The major Atlantic ocean current, to which also the Gulf stream belongs, may have been losing stability in the course of the last century. This is shown in a new study published in Nature Climate Change. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, transports warm water masses from the tropics northward at the ocean surface and cold water southward at the ocean bottom, which is most relevant for the relatively mild temperatures in Europe. Further, it influences weather systems worldwide. A potential collapse of this ocean current system could therefore have severe consequences.
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Parts of Greenland may be on the verge of tipping: new early-warning signals detected
05/18/2021 - Scientists have detected new early-warning signals indicating that the central-western part of the Greenland Ice Sheet may undergo a critical transition relatively soon. Because of rising temperatures, a new study by researchers from Germany and Norway shows, the destabilization of the ice sheet has begun and the process of melting may escalate already at limited warming levels. A tipping of the ice sheet would substantially increase long-term global sea level rise.
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Melting ice: Limiting global warming to 1.5°C could reduce sea level rise by 50 percent
05/05/2021 - If efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels are successful, the overall sea level rise caused by melting of ice would be effectively halved. This is the central finding of a new study by an international team of researchers – including Ronja Reese, Ricarda Winkelmann, Torsten Albrecht and Reinhard Calov from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research – which examines the land ice contribution to sea levels in the 21st century arising from the world’s glaciers and the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.
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PIK at the Chaos Communication Congress rC3
12/23/2020 - This year everything is different. The legendary Chaos Communication Congress is taking place remotely this year due to Corona - but experts from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research will contribute. The major event of Europe's largest hacker association Chaos Computer Club (CCC) traditionally attracts thousands of people to the exhibition halls in Leipzig over the four days between Christmas and New Year, but this year those interested can attend the Remote Chaos Experience (rC3) from home.
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Ice loss due to warming leads to warming due to ice loss: a vicious circle
10/27/2020 - The loss of huge ice masses can contribute to the warming that is causing this loss and further risks. A new study now quantifies this feedback by exploring long-term if-then-scenarios. If the Arctic summer sea-ice were to melt completely, a scenario that is likely to become reality at least temporarily within this century with ongoing greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels, this could eventually add roughly 0.2°C to global warming. This is, however, not in addition to IPCC projections of future warming since these already take the relevant mechanisms into account. Still, the scientists could now separate the effects of the ice loss from other effects and quantify it. The 0.2°C are substantial, given that global mean temperature is currently about one degree higher than in pre-industrial times, and governments worldwide agreed to stop the increase well below two degrees.
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Stability Check on Antarctica Reveals High Risk for Long-Term Sea-Level Rise
09/23/2020 - The warmer it gets, the faster Antarctica loses ice – and much of it will then be gone forever. Consequences for the world’s coastal cities and cultural heritage sites would be detrimental, from London to Mumbai, and from New York to Shanghai. That’s what a team of researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Potsdam University and New York’s Columbia University has found out in their new study, published in Nature (cover story), on how much warming the Antarctic Ice Sheet can survive. In around one million hours of computation time, their unprecedentedly detailed simulations delineate where exactly and at which warming levels the ice would become unstable and eventually melt and drain into the ocean. They find a delicate concert of accelerating and moderating effects, but the main conclusion is that unmitigated climate change would have dire long-term consequences: If the global mean temperature level is sustained long enough at 4 degrees above pre-industrial levels, Antarctic melting alone could eventually raise global sea levels by more than six meters.
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Shrinking Home Lands: How Island and Archipelagic States address climate migration
09/04/2020 – Small Island and archipelagic States are amongst those who feel climate change impacts the earliest and the severest. Their livelihoods at risk, people face the decision to move to safer grounds. A new report by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research for the German Cooperation agency GIZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit) has now scrutinised policy responses by the States to migration in the context of climate change and provides policy recommendations.
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Sea level could rise more than 1 metre by 2100 if emission targets are not met, reveals survey amongst 100 experts
08/05/2020 - Global mean sea-level rise could exceed 1 metres by 2100 and 5 metres by 2300 with unchecked emissions, a survey among 100 leading international experts finds. The risk assessment is based on the increasing body of knowledge of the systems involved – while the scientists highlight the remaining uncertainties, they say it is clear now that previous sea-level rise estimates have been too low. The study led by scientists of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) appears today in the Nature partner journal Climate and Atmospheric Science.
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The Antarctica Factor: model uncertainties reveal upcoming sea level risk
Sea level rise due to ice loss in Antarctica could become a major risk for coastal protection even in the near term, scientists say. Within this century already, due to Antarctica alone global sea level might rise up to three times as much as it did in the last century. This is a finding of an exceptionally comprehensive comparison of state-of-the-art computer models from around the world.
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2°C ocean warming has been enough to destabilize Antarctica in the past
12/02/2020 - A melting of the Antarctic ice sheets would have far-reaching consequences for sea-level rise and coastal regions around the world. Based on new data from the Antarctic ice, an international team of scientists now reveals how the ice sheet reacted to rising temperatures in the past. Published in the US Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, their study using data from a blue ice field shows for the first time that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet already proved to be quite unstable during the last warm period 120,000 years ago. The Eemian warm period was the last phase of climate history with global temperatures similar to those that the world is heading towards due to manmade global warming in the coming decades.
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Planetary boundaries: Interactions in the Earth system amplify human impacts
16/12/2019 - What we do to one part of our Earth system does not just add to what we do to other parts – transgressing one planetary boundary can amplify human impacts on another one. For the first time, an international team of scientists now quantified some of the planetary-scale interactions in the Earth system. These biophysical interactions have in fact almost doubled direct human impacts on the nine planetary boundaries, from climate change to freshwater use. This insight can now be applied in policy design for safeguarding the livelihoods of generations to come.
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Climate tipping points – too risky to bet against
28/11/2019 - From the Greenland and West-Antarctic ice sheets to coral reefs or the Amazon rainforest – a number of critical elements in the Earth system could be more likely to tip than was previously thought, a group of leading scientists warns in in the highly renowned journal Nature. Evidence is mounting that these events are also more interconnected, which could eventually lead to domino effects. A possible tipping cascade of irreversible changes might put the livelihoods of people around the world at risk and marks a state of planetary emergency, the authors argue in their comment.
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Just 15 years of post-Paris emissions to lock in 20 cm of sea level rise in 2300: study
5.11.2019 - Unless governments significantly scale up their emission reduction efforts, the 15 years’ worth of emissions released under their current Paris Agreement pledges alone would cause 20 cm of sea-level rise over the longer term, according to new research published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
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Sea level rise: West Antarctic ice collapse may be prevented by snowing ocean water onto it
18/07/2019 - The ice sheet covering West Antarctica is at risk of sliding off into the ocean. While further ice-sheet destabilisation in other parts of the continent may be limited by a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, the slow, yet inexorable loss of West Antarctic ice is likely to continue even after climate warming is stabilised. A collapse might take hundreds of years but will raise sea levels worldwide by more than three meters. A team of researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) is now scrutinising a daring way of stabilising the ice sheet: Generating trillions of tons of additional snowfall by pumping ocean water onto the glaciers and distributing it with snow canons. This would mean unprecedented engineering efforts and a substantial environmental hazard in one of the world’s last pristine regions – to prevent long-term sea level rise for some of the world’s most densely populated areas along coastlines from the US to China.
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Initiated instability in West Antarctica might be the fastest on the continent
13/06/2019 - All around the Antarctic coastline there are ice sheet instabilities waiting to be triggered. If this happens ice flows inexorably into the ocean and raises sea levels worldwide. The one region where instability likely has already been initiated by a warming of the ocean is probably the region which collapses faster than any other, find scientists from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). Even though the rapid ice loss takes decades to unfold and centuries to complete, the speed of ice loss from Antarctica is already a major driver of global sea level rise. It will affect hundreds of millions of people living near the world’s coastlines, from Miami to Shanghai.
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Summer extremes of 2018 linked to stalled giant waves in jet stream
29/04/2019 - Record breaking heatwaves and droughts in North America and Western Europe, torrential rainfalls and floods in South-East Europe and Japan - the summer of 2018 brought a series of extreme weather events that occurred almost simultaneously around the Northern Hemisphere in June and July. These extremes had something in common, a new study by an international team of climate researchers now finds: the events were connected by a newly identified pattern of the jet stream encircling the Earth. The jet stream formed a stalled wave pattern in the atmosphere which made weather conditions more persistent and thus extreme in the affected regions. The same pattern also occurred during European heat waves in 2015, 2006 and 2003, which rank among the most extreme heatwaves ever recorded. In recent years, the scientists observed a clear increase of these patterns.
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More CO2 than ever before in 3 million years, shows unprecedented computer simulation
03/04/2019 - CO2 greenhouse gas amounts in the atmosphere are likely higher today than ever before in the past 3 million years. For the first time, a team of scientists succeeded to do a computer simulation that fits ocean floor sediment data of climate evolution over this period of time. Ice age onset, hence the start of the glacial cycles from cold to warm and back, the study reveals, was mainly triggered by a decrease of CO2-levels. Yet today, it is the increase of greenhouse gases due to the burning of fossil fuels that is fundamentally changing our planet, the analysis further confirms. Global mean temperatures never exceeded the preindustrial levels by more than 2 degrees Celsius in the past 3 million years, the study shows – while current climate policy inaction, if continued, would exceed the 2 degrees limit already in the next 50 years.
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Marlene Kretschmer wins Köppen-Preis for her outstanding dissertation on polar vortex
24.01.2019 - Marlene Kretschmer from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), has been awarded the 2018 Wladimir Peter Köppen Prize for her remarkable dissertation completed at PIK and the University of Potsdam. Its “importance for climate research, in terms of its innovativeness and relevance, is outstanding”, the jury of the Hamburg-based Cluster of Excellence CliSAP praised the work.
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Science to COP25: Must Knows for Climate Negotiators
06/12/2019 – The pace of contemporary rise in greenhouse gas concentrations is unprecedented in climate history over the past 66 million years and weather extremes are the “new normal,” according to some of the latest findings in climate science compiled in an easy-to-read guide for negotiators, policymakers, and media for the COP25 world climate summit. PIK Director Johan Rockström and colleagues from Future Earth and the Earth League today presented the “10 New Insights in Climate Science” report to UNFCCC’s Executive Secretary Patricia Espinosa at the meeting in the Spanish capital Madrid.
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Ricarda Winkelmann wins academics' young scientist award
06/12/2018 - Ricarda Winkelmann from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) has been honoured as this year's Young Scientist of the Year by 'academics' by ZEIT publishing group. Winkelmann was awarded due to her outstanding and groundbreaking research and publication achievements in researching the climate system and the risks of climate change. She is junior professor for Climate System Analysis at the University of Potsdam and scientist at PIK in research domain Earth System Analysis. She heads the Leibniz project "DominoES - Domino Effects in the Earth System" as well as the PIK working group on ice sheet dynamics.
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Earth League meets up in New Delhi: Climate Jamboree and Science Circle
08.11.2018 - From weather extremes to sea-level rise and tipping elements - more than 10.000 youths came together with science experts and artists last week in New Delhi for the Climate Jamboree Conference. Johan Rockström, PIK Director Designate, and Stefan Rahmstorf, Chair of PIK research domain Earth System Analysis, were among the key speakers, with lectures on a safe future for humanity on earth and new insights and hot topics from climate science. Organized by Leena Srivastava of TERI School of Advanced Studies, the participative Climate Jamboree with scientific talks, workshops and concerts was the grand finale of a series of events with the aim to empower youth to engage for climate action and sustainable development.
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"Which Future?!" and "Schimmelreiter": Climate research on stage
02/10/2018 - What if Italy would exit the Euro and the currency would collapse? What if there were no money at the ATMs, due to a new banking crisis? What if there were a migration crisis? What if there were sudden and extreme climate changes? Questions like theses are discussed in the new play "Let Them Eat Money. Welche Zukunft?!" (Which Future?!) that just premiered at the Deutsche Theater in Berlin.
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