Climate Change Institute

The University of Maine’s School of Policy and International Affairs (SPIA) and the Climate Change Institute (CCI) will partner with the American Security Project (ASP) and Natural Resources Council of Maine (NRCM) for an in-person public panel “Consistent and Compelling: Maine’s Model for Mitigating Climate Change” 4–5 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 14, at Buchanan Alumni […]

The journal Science published a perspective paper by University of Maine researchers Daniel Sandweiss and Kirk Maasch about how El Niño influences the presence of fauna and human predation of it. In their piece, Sandweiss, a professor in the Anthropology Department and Climate Change Institute, and Maasch, a professor in the School of Earth and […]

In an article about the retreat of the Thwaites glacier, Popular Science cited a 1973 paper by Terry Hughes, professor emeritus at the University of Maine School of Earth and Climate Sciences and Climate Change Institute, where he famously asked the question that scientists are still asking today: “Is The West Antarctic Ice Sheet Disintegrating?”

In an article about the upcoming hurricane season, the Miami Herald cited calculations from the University of Maine Climate Change Institute’s Climate Reanalyzer showing that Sunday marked the highest sea surface temperature on record for the North Atlantic. Despite the warm water temperatures, which usually lead to more hurricane activity, this hurricane season has been […]

Reuters interviewed Maine state climatologist and University of Maine faculty member Sean Birkel about tweets sharing inaccurate conclusions drawn from images from the Climate Reanalyzer, a platform for visualizing climate and weather datasets that he developed. Birkel, a research assistant professor at the Climate Change Institute and climate services specialist with University of Maine Cooperative […]

Daniel Sandweiss, a world-renowned researcher in Latin American archaeology and paleoclimatology, was named the 2022 Distinguished Maine Professor. This award is the highest faculty award, and honors a UMaine faculty member each year for excellence in teaching, research, and community service. Sandweiss, who has been at UMaine since 1993, teaches courses ranging from introductory anthropology […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a $661,462 Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) grant to the University of Maine to upgrade a multiuser instrument in the Climate Change Institute. Over the last two decades, the University of Maine Climate Change Institute’s ICP-MS facility has conducted valuable climate, environmental, ecosystem and engineering research and training across the […]

Sean Birkel, state climatologist and assistant professor at the Climate Change Institute and Cooperative Extension at the University of Maine, spoke to News Center Maine for an article about the impact of climate change on Maine dairy farmers. Birkel said that while more arid regions of the country will get drier with the increasing temperatures, […]

El Nino has been a major driver of societal collapse, various catastrophes and cultural change in coastal Peru for millenia, but it isn’t the only culprit. In a new study, University of Maine researchers warn against over-interpreting the role climatic change, like an El Nino event, plays in societal and cultural transition. Dan Sandweiss, a […]

In an article debunking a tweet that used an image from the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer, Climate Fact Check noted that the Data Sources & Additional Information section on the Climate Reanalyzer website clearly mentions that climate trends should be inferred from long-term data. Thus, using the global temperature record on a single day […]