by Daniel Brouse Climate change is among the greatest global threats to coral reef ecosystems. Rising ocean temperatures, ocean acidification, marine heatwaves, and increasingly severe disturbances are driving widespread coral bleaching, disease, mortality, and the degradation of reef structures. Key Threats to Coral Reefs Thermal Stress: Warmer ocean temperatures disrupt the symbiotic relationship between corals […]
Category Archives: Environment
Accelerating Earth-System Tipping Points
by Daniel Brouse Coral Reefs, Permafrost, Ocean Circulation, the Amazon, and the Polar Ice Sheets Earth’s climate system is not responding to warming at a uniform or constant rate. As global temperatures rise, several interconnected Earth systems are experiencing increasingly severe stress, with some showing evidence of accelerating change and self-reinforcing feedbacks. Warm-water coral reefs […]
Earth-System Tipping Points Are Accelerating
by Daniel Brouse Fastest-Moving Tipping Systems Coral Reef Die-Offs Warm-water coral reef dieback is widely recognized as one of the clearest examples of an Earth-system tipping point now being actively crossed—and among the major ecological tipping systems, it is showing some of the fastest rates of deterioration. Driven by record-breaking marine heatwaves associated with global […]
Climate Change and the Global Insurance Crisis: Rising Losses, Retreating Insurers, and the Growing Protection Gap
by Daniel Brouse Climate change is fundamentally destabilizing insurance markets by driving increasingly severe financial losses, pushing premiums sharply higher, and causing insurers to reduce or withdraw coverage in some high-risk regions. As extreme weather events become more frequent and, in many cases, more intense, traditional underwriting models are being challenged by rapidly changing risk. […]
Also posted in Business, Energy, Finance, Global Warming, Science
Tagged climate change, insurance, real estate
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The Water Cycle’s Extreme Energy Transfer
Latent Heat and You By Daniel Brouse You probably think of the water cycle as a simple process: Evaporation → clouds → rain But there is something hidden inside that cycle: energy. Every time water evaporates, enormous amounts of energy move from one place to another. As climate change warms the oceans and atmosphere, this […]
The Latent Heat Engine: Ocean Evaporation, Water Vapor Feedback, and the Acceleration of Hydroclimatic Whiplash
By Daniel Brouse Abstract The ocean is Earth’s largest reservoir of stored thermal energy and a central component of the climate system’s energy redistribution machinery. One of the most important pathways by which the ocean transfers energy to the atmosphere is latent heat flux associated with evaporation. When liquid water evaporates, energy is removed from […]
Heat-Triggered Flash Droughts: The Rapid Intensification of Heat, Drought, and Wildfire Risk
by Daniel Brouse The Trend Flash droughts are one of the three fastest-accelerating climate extremes. The share of global land affected by heat-driven drought has expanded dramatically—from approximately 2.5% in the 1980s to 16.7% in recent years. The rate of increase has also accelerated, rising roughly eightfold since 2000. This shift is important because heat-triggered […]
Also posted in Agriculture, Business, Energy, Global Warming, Science
Tagged climate change
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Global Wildfire Smoke
by Daniel Brouse Global warming is exactly that—global. These two videos of the 2026 wildfire season provide a striking example. The first video shows wildfire smoke spreading across North America. The second follows that smoke as it is transported across the atmosphere and circulates around the globe, reaching the UK and Europe. The second video […]
A More Episodic Hydrologic Cycle in a Warming Climate
by Daniel Brouse Changing Atmospheric Moisture Transport, Precipitation Intensity, and the Redistribution of Water Abstract Climate warming is altering the atmospheric hydrologic cycle in ways that extend beyond changes in average precipitation. This paper examines the hypothesis that warming is increasing atmospheric moisture residence time and transport distance while simultaneously intensifying precipitation and, in some […]
Climate Change and Moisture Transport
I’m wondering whether there is any way to quantify whether precipitation is now falling more rapidly over smaller areas and closer to where the moisture originates, potentially contributing to historically high-volume flooding. Conversely, could less precipitation falling over broader areas be contributing to worsening drought and diminishing inland snowpack? Is there any long-term tracking of […]