Climate Change Institute

Insect herbivores have caused more damage to plant matter from leaves in recent history than millions of years ago, according to a new study led by a University of Maine postdoctoral researcher. Despite global insect decline and biodiversity loss fueled by human activity, the frequency of leaf damage by insects among forest plants in recent […]

Daniel Sandweiss, professor of anthropology at the University of Maine, spoke to the New York Times about the impact of looting and development on archaeological sites in coastal Peru. “It’s a victory every time archaeologists can recover something responsibly and put it into the record. Peru has the most fascinating pre-European records of any place […]

Daniel Sandweiss’s archaelogy career doesn’t mirror depictions of those in movies like “Indiana Jones,” but for him, it’s been equally as exciting. Over the years, Sandweiss, a University of Maine professor in the Anthropology Department and Climate Change Institute, has uncovered extensive evidence into how ancient civilization dealt with natural disasters, such as climate change, […]

Paul Mayewski, director and professor at the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine, and Anders Beal, associate in the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and former UMaine graduate student of Global Policy, co-authored an opinion piece for The Hill about how critical this decade is in terms of addressing the climate crisis […]

Bradfield Lyon, a research professor at the University of Maine Climate Change Institute, spoke to the Guardian about this September’s record-breaking heat waves in California. “By mid-century, the [spatial] size of heatwaves in the US are expected to increase between about 50% to 80% from what they are in the current climate. The frequency will […]

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 […]