Last updated: October 24, 2026.
This guide collects the climate and environment studies covered on Nexo Science, grouped by topic. Each link goes to a full article about one peer-reviewed paper: what was found, how strong the evidence is and what is still uncertain.
Heat, drought and extreme events
- Heat Waves Are Raising the Risk of Premature Birth
What if the weather during the first weeks of a pregnancy quietly decided how it would end? A review of nearly 200 studies, published in 2025, found real evidence that it does. - 40% Worse: How Global Warming Is Supercharging Droughts Worldwide
Cracked riverbeds, empty reservoirs and record-breaking dry spells: new global data show that a warming atmosphere is now driving nearly half of the world's worsening droughts, not a lack of rain. - Canada's Worst Wildfire Season Wasn't Bad Luck. It Was Climate Change.
What does it take to turn an ordinary fire season into the worst one Canada has ever recorded? A new analysis of the 2023 wildfires points to a stretch of extreme heat and drought that climate change made far more likely, burning more than seven times the historical average area in a single year. - Climate Models vs. Reality: Why Heatwaves Keep Outrunning the Forecast
Picture checking the forecast before a heatwave and then watching the real temperature blow past it by several degrees. That gap between prediction and reality is showing up again and again across the planet, and a new look at six decades of temperature data suggests it is not just a feeling. - What if Brazil's deadliest climate disaster is the one it has never declared?
How many deaths does a country have to miss before it notices? In Brazil's cities, heat waves left a toll that no alert system flagged, and it fell hardest on those with the least. - Climate accountability: fossil fuel giants' past emissions will keep heating Earth for centuries
Climate accountability for 178 fossil fuel giants runs for centuries: their past emissions will still warm Earth in 2500, and more so in a greener future. - Europe's most protected wines are the ones climate change threatens most, and the label is the reason
What if the very rules that guarantee a bottle of Champagne is really Champagne turned out to be the biggest obstacle to that wine surviving the century?
Oceans and ice
- Ocean Acidification: Marine Life Is Already Struggling Under the 'Mild' Climate Scenarios
Averaging the numbers made ocean acidification look almost harmless under the safer climate scenarios. A large analysis of 217 studies suggests that was an illusion, not good news. - Can Scientists Breed Corals Tough Enough for a Hotter Ocean?
Selective breeding has shaped disease-resistant wheat, drought-tolerant crops and cold-hardy trees for generations. Now, for the first time, scientists in Palau have tested whether the same old trick works on something far more fragile than a field crop: a coral reef running out of time. - Is the Ocean Current That Keeps Europe Mild Approaching a Tipping Point?
Picture Bergen's winters turning three degrees colder every decade instead of warmer. A new physics-based warning signal suggests the ocean system that keeps Europe's climate mild, the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, is edging toward exactly that kind of abrupt shift. - Antarctica's coldest, densest water is shrinking, and melting ice is not the culprit
Winds off a single stretch of Antarctic coast now look powerful enough to throttle the deep ocean's heat and carbon engine, a mechanism the leading climate assessment had not flagged. - A healthy coral can revive its bleached neighbor by fusing with it, as long as they're clones
Can a healthy coral reverse coral bleaching in its neighbor? In lab tanks, a week of contact was enough, but only between clones of the same colony.
Pollution, plastics and soil
- Does Air Pollution Cancel Out the Benefits of Your Daily Walk? A Study of 1.5 Million People Has an Answer
Roughly half the people on Earth breathe air polluted enough to raise the question. A massive new analysis of 1.5 million adults finally tested whether exercise still protects you when the air quality is bad. - Plastic Pollution Is Quietly Boosting the Carbon Locked Away in Soil
It sounds like an unlikely environmental win: soil packed with microscopic plastic waste appears to hold onto more carbon than soil left alone. A large new analysis of laboratory experiments suggests the real picture is far messier than that. - Microplastics aren't so inert after all: their wet surfaces make reactive oxygen on their own
Plain water was all it took: six common microplastics produced reactive oxygen species at their surfaces in lab tests, with no light or added chemicals. - Burned tanks, poisoned ground: what a wrecked armored vehicle leaves in the soil
Walk up to a burned tank in a Ukrainian field and the earth under your boots is close to lifeless, though the poisoned circle turns out to be far smaller than you would expect. - Hidden in plain water: the metrics used to protect rivers score worse than chance
Can a river's chemistry tell you whether its animals are surviving? The most comprehensive assessment of freshwater extinction risk ever completed finds close to a quarter of its species threatened, and shows that the hydrological indicators used to set conservation targets perform worse than random when it comes to locating where those species actually are.
Food, farming and emissions
- Cutting Methane by a Third: The Feed Additive Taking On Cow Burps
Could a pinch of feed additive slash a cow's methane output by nearly a third? Pooled data from 13 trials says yes, though how much depends on what else is in the trough. - Vegan, vegetarian, fish-eater or meat-eater: what real British diets reveal about their environmental cost
How much does the environmental footprint of a diet actually shift when someone eats less meat in real life, rather than in a computer model? Data from more than fifty-five thousand British adults, linked to farm-level environmental records from more than a hundred countries, puts a number on it. - Bring a drained wetland back to life and its methane emissions soar, but the climate still wins
Wetland restoration is sold as an unambiguous climate win, and it mostly is, but the rewetted ground leaks methane for years, and international emissions inventories have barely accounted for it. - Europe's Abandoned Farms Are Turning Wild. Is That Good for Nature?
If you have ever driven past a derelict field and assumed nature was quietly repairing it, a European study suggests the outcome depends far more on policy than on patience.
What people actually do
- Stop Assuming Scary Climate Messages Actually Move People to Act
What actually gets someone to share a climate post on social media, and does that have anything to do with what gets them to spend real effort helping the planet? A massive global experiment just tested eleven ways of talking about climate change side by side, and the answers to those two questions turned out to be almost opposites. - Recycling Sticks, but Most Other Green Habits Barely Move
Nudge someone toward recycling and it tends to stick. Nudge them toward driving less or buying an efficient fridge, and the effect barely survives the campaign that produced it.
We update this page as new studies come out.