Latest science

Our cities in the 30-year climate firing line

Today 11:00am - New Zealanders are among the billions of city dwellers who will be hit by the impacts of climate change within three decades, a new report shows.

Billions of tonnes of CO2 safe underground, says report

Monday - Storing billions of tonnes of CO2 underground would be a “safe and effective” way to help to limit the effects of climate change, a new study says.

Warming world will weaken rice nutrition

Monday - Climate change will make rice less nutritious, putting millions of the world’s poor at risk, new studies show.

Why methane should be treated differently

13 Jun 18 - New research provides a way out of a longstanding quandary in climate policy: how best to account for the warming effects of greenhouse gases that have different atmospheric lifetimes.

NEW-WAVE: Microsoft goes deep with subsea data centre

8 Jun 18 - Microsoft has placed a data centre on the sea floor off the Scottish coast in an innovative environmental test.

Hitting 1.5deg warming point could save the world trillions

24 May 18 - Holding global warming to 1.5deg instead of 2deg could save the world more than $29 trillion, researchers say.

How the 'carbon budget' is causing problems

24 May 18 - Few ideas in climate science have gained greater public attention in the last decade than the concept of the “carbon budget”.

Just 0.01% of all life, but we've wiped out most living things

23 May 18 - Humankind is revealed as simultaneously insignificant and utterly dominant by a groundbreaking new assessment of all life on the planet.

Soon your phone might be powered by ship soot

23 May 18 - Researchers found a way to turn carbon pollution into graphite, a component widely used in batteries.

Bill Gates company goes in search of nuclear Nirvana

7 May 18 - Microsoft founder Bill Gates' company TerraPower aims to build a safe, nearly waste-free nuclear reactor that won't contribute to weapons proliferation or climate change.

ROCK ROLE: Sorry, but nitrogen from stone is no magic bullet

3 May 18 - Nitrogen from rock could fuel plant growth around the world – but not enough to prevent climate change.

Graphene could be game-changer for concrete

26 Apr 18 - The novel “supermaterial” graphene could hold the key to making concrete greener, new scientific research suggests.

Victoria sitting on full house for climate report

24 Apr 18 - Five Victoria University academics will be lead authors on the next IPCC assessment report.

The trouble with permafrost is its impermanence

24 Apr 18 - The world’s permafrost holds vast stores of carbon. What happens when it thaws?

World can limit global warming without BECCS

17 Apr 18 - It is possible to limit warming to 1.5deg above pre-industrial temperatures without using negative emissions from bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), new research says.

BREAKTHROUGH: Science gets to the heart of methane

20 Mar 18 - Scientists have sequenced the genomes of the micro-organisms that make sheep and cattle emit methane.

Did burning coalfields cause Earth’s worst mass extinction?

14 Mar 18 - Earth has gone through five mass extinction events – scientists are worried we’re on course to trigger a sixth – and the deadliest one happened 252 million years ago.

Plastic pollution has now spread to rivers

13 Mar 18 - Microplastics are contaminating rivers as well as the ocean, say scientists.

Battered ecosystems almost never recover

2 Mar 18 - Ecosystems almost never recover completely from large-scale destruction — even when they're actively restored, says a team of international researchers.