Economic growth goes down when the number of wet days and days with extreme rainfall go up. PIK researchers found that statistically 10 more wet days in a year reduce economic growth of a region by 1%. Rich countries are most severely affected, especially the manufacturing and service sectors. The data analysis of more than 1.500 regions over the past 40 years shows a clear connection and suggests that a rising number of daily rainfall extremes, caused by human-made climate change, will harm the global economy.

Over the past century, global greenhouse gas emissions have led to a sharp increase in the number of bat species in the southern Chinese Yunnan province. Bats in this area have been suggested as the original carriers of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. Scientists from Cambridge, Potsdam and Hawaii showed in a study that climate change caused shifts in the natural vegetation of the region, which allowed c. 40 bat species, carrying around 100 coronaviruses, to expand into newly suitable habitat. This process would have likely created new opportunities for viruses to be transmitted or evolve, potentially facilitating the eventual spill-over to humans. In this way, climate change may have played an important role in the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2.

Never before in over 1000 years the Gulf Stream System (also known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation AMOC), has been as weak as in the last decades. PIK researchers have determined evidence of the AMOC weakening with the help of 11 proxy data series (information gathered by so called climate archives like ocean sediments, corals etc): They have compiled 11 independent data series from the North Atlantic, almost all of them from deep-sea sediment cores. They all provide a consistent picture about the flow characteristics of the Gulf Stream System and its weakening in the past 70 years. The slowdown is likely related to man-made climate change.