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Andrew Carnegie

The Carnegie Institution for Science is a private organization that conducts basic research for the benefit of humanity.

Other News

December 14, 2015 — Dan Rather interveiws Chris Field about climate change. The interview was published by the Huffington Post. more »

December 10,2015 — “I started out thinking that it was all about information, and if we only got the right information to the right people, then the right things would happen,” Ken Caldeira tells WIRED Magazine." more »

December 10,2015 — 50 years after the first U.S. president was warned about climate change, it is "the defining issue of our time," Chris Field told attendees. more »

September 13, 2015 — “This is humanity as a geologic force,” Ken Caldeira tells the New York Times. “We’re not a subtle influence on the climate system – we are really hitting it with a hammer.” more »

In Memoriam

Jeanette Snyder Brown
1925 – 2014

 

Recent News

Ocean acidification already slowing coral reef growth

Wednesday, February 24, 2016—A team of scientists led by DGE’s Rebecca Albright and Ken Caldeira performed the first-ever experiment that manipulated seawater chemistry in a natural coral reef community in order to determine the effect that excess carbon dioxide released by human activity is having on coral reefs. Their results provide evide. more »

Tens of millions of trees in danger from California drought

Monday, December 28, 2015— California’s forests are home to the planet’s oldest, tallest and most-massive trees. New research from Carnegie’s Greg Asner and his team reveals that up to 58 million large trees in California experienced severe canopy water loss between 2011 and today due to the state’s historic drought. Their results are published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. more »

Elephants boost tree losses in South Africa’s largest savanna reserve

Monday, October 26, 2015— Protected areas, such as nature reserves and national parks, play a crucial role in sheltering wildlife, such as African elephants, from hunting and habitat destruction. But it’s important that conservation managers understand how the vegetation in these natural protected zones is affected by the population growth that is spurred by this animal safeguarding. To this end, new work from a team led by Greg Asner examined the effect elephants have on the woody plant life in Kruger National Park, the largest protected area in South Africa, and showed that elephants are one of the preserve’s leading causes of fallen trees. more »

Solar Energy’s Land-Use Impact

Monday, October 19, 2015 — With mounting vigor for combating global climate change, increasing the use of renewable energy resources such as solar, without compromising natural habitats, is a challenge to the traditional model of utility-scale solar energy installations. Such facilities use vast swaths of land for solar gathering and generating equipment. Until now, studies quantifying the effects on land-cover change and analyses of impacts on protected areas near solar facilities have been limited. New work from Rebecca R. Hernandez (now at UC-Berkley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab), Madison K. Hoffacker (now at UC-Riverside’s Center for Conservation Biology), and colleagues, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, assessed the siting impacts of 161 existing, under construction, and planned utility-scale solar energy facilities in California. more »