Genetic sleuthing techniques that led to the arrest of a suspect in the infamous Golden State Killer case this year are set to become vastly more powerful, suggest two papers published today. Yaniv Erlich, a computational geneticist at Columbia, led one of the studies.
A special report published this week finds that things will get a lot worse if we let the planet reach 2 degrees of warming. To limit climate change to 1.5ºC of warming, the world needs to reach zero net emissions by 2050. This will be challenging, but not impossible.
“What’s not emphasized enough is the sea level-rise connection,” Suzana Camargo, a Columbia atmospheric scientist, said. “Even if there weren’t changes in the hurricane itself, just because you have sea-level rise you end up having more flooding.”
Climate science tells us that in the future, combinations of heat and humidity could be so extreme that the evaporation of human sweat may not sufficiently cool our bodies, say Columbia climate scientists Radley Horton and Ethan Coffel in a New York Times op-ed.