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A new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience has found that the goal of the Paris climate accord of keeping global warming levels below 2ºC (3.6ºF) may be easier to achieve than originally anticipated, allowing humanity a much larger carbon budget to work with. One of the major reasons certain parties have rejected the Paris Accord was the perceived difficulty in attaining that goal, but this new finding, if correct, should help encourage more action in regards to what we need to do to curtail global warming.
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Ordinarily, the bright, white surface of glacial ice found in ice sheets such as the ones that cover Greenland and Antarctica serve to function as reflectors that bounce a certain amount of solar radiation back into space — this effect also helps prevent the ice from being directly warmed too much by the sun. The effect of the ice’s reflectiveness, or albedo, can be compromised by changes in its color, for instance by soot being deposited on the surface from large wildfires ravaging a different part of the globe. The darkening of the ice causes it to absorb more sunlight, and in turn this increases the temperature of the ice, hastening its rate of melt. Now, a new factor has been identified that can darken the albedo of Greenland’s ice: the spread of simple algae.
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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is calling for a warm autumn in the United States, forecasting above average temperatures for August, September and October. In addition, an above average amount of rain is also forecast for portions of Alaska and the U.S. Southwest and South, with the Pacific Northwest seeing less precipitation than usual.

"You can see that across the entire United States, including Alaska, there is more of a chance that temperatures will be above normal," according to meteorologist Dan Collins, with NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center-Operational Prediction Branch.
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One could say that we have a beef with the rising amount of methane (CH4) in the atmosphere: although this powerful greenhouse gas breaks down much faster than carbon dioxide, it traps 86 times more heat than CO2 over a 20-year span. Human activity has been the chief source of the increase in modern CH4 levels, having increased by about 150 percent since 1750, with about half of all human-generated methane coming from our livestock — particularly from the planet’s 1.5 billion cows. However, a new study has found that spicing a cow’s feed with simple seaweed can cut a burping bovine’s methane production by up to 99 percent.
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