There is a way to reverse temperature rise, but it will be challenging and there are great uncertainties. In June, more than 60 climate scientists warned that the remaining "carbon budget" to stay below a dire warming threshold will be...

In June, more than 60 climate scientists warned that the remaining "carbon budget" to stay below a dire warming threshold will be exhausted in as little as three years at the current rate of emissions. But if we pass that...

Ice calving from the fracture zone of a glacier crashes into the ocean in Greenland. Record greenhouse gas emissions could exhaust Earth's "carbon budget" in as little as three years, dooming the planet to breach the symbolic threshold of 1.5...

A new report from the United Nations weather agency gives a three-out-of-four chance that the next five years will average more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures.

Globally, native biomes have been unprecedentedly threatened by anthropogenic activities and are already showing signs of decreasing resilience6,7,8. Among those endangered biomes is the Amazon forest, where increasing droughts, the loss of biodiversity, degradation and deforestation9,10,11,12,13,14 outpace natural variability15. Furthermore, the forest is transitioning from one of the largest terrestrial carbon sinks to a carbon source16,17,18. Importantly, direct and indirect stressors, such as deforestation and increases in extreme drought events, may be self-amplified by the forest system itself19. Thus, it is considered a tipping element of the Earth system whereby critical transitions may occur if local thresholds are crossed, which could trigger self-amplified changes as stabilizing feedbacks shift to destabilizing ones20,21. So far, Earth system models have focused primarily on forcing climate-induced state shifts and found critical global warming thresholds in the Amazon between 2 and 6 °C (refs. 20,22,23,24,25,26). On the other hand, some Earth system model studies27,28 and an empirical study29 identify regional forest shifts before these levels of global warming. In fact, the Amazon forest system could experience critical transitions at lower global warming levels than previously predicted through a range of adverse compounding drivers (for example, through heating, degradation, droughts and deforestation) occurring simultaneously rather than...