{"id":4082,"date":"2020-01-15T18:17:37","date_gmt":"2020-01-15T18:17:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/?p=4082"},"modified":"2020-01-15T18:17:49","modified_gmt":"2020-01-15T18:17:49","slug":"the-climate-papers-most-featured-in-the-media-in-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/2020\/01\/15\/the-climate-papers-most-featured-in-the-media-in-2019\/","title":{"rendered":"The Climate Papers Most Featured in the Media in 2019"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

CSTPR’s MeCCO work for Lancet Report (#12 most featured in the media) highlighted in Carbon Brief<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last year saw the rise of climate change protests, with Greta Thunberg, school strikes and Extinction Rebellion generating global news coverage.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The impacts of climate change and extreme weather also hit many newspaper frontpages over the past 12 months, from devastating fires in both the Amazon<\/a> and Australia<\/a> to Greenland\u2019s melting ice sheet<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amidst an extraordinary year for media coverage of climate change, scientists and researchers were busily publishing thousands of peer-reviewed journal papers on their latest findings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These were reported around the world in news articles and blogs and shared on social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Reddit. Tracking all these \u201cmentions\u201d was Altmetric<\/a>, an organisation that scores and ranks papers according to the attention they receive. (Full details of how the Altmetric scoring system works can be found in an earlier article<\/a>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Using Altmetric data for 2019, Carbon Brief has compiled its annual list of the 25 most talked-about climate change-related papers that were published the previous year. The infographic above shows which ones made it into the Top 10.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Number one<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

According to Altmetric, the two highest-scoring climate papers in 2019 are commentaries. These are \u201cWorld scientists\u2019 warning of a climate emergency<\/a>\u201d in the journal BioScience, with a score of 10,950, and \u201cClimate tipping points \u2013 too risky to bet against<\/a>\u201d in Nature, which scored 8,552.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The two papers were the third and fifth highest-scoring, respectively, of any \u201cresearch outputs\u201d published in 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The BioScience \u201cviewpoint\u201d piece declares \u201cclearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency\u201d. The paper has five authors, but it was the 11,258 scientist signatories from 153 countries<\/a> that particularly attracted media attention<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Nature \u201ccomment\u201d paper has a similarly stark message, warning that \u201cevidence from tipping points alone suggests that we are in a state of planetary emergency: both the risk and urgency of the situation are acute\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite their high scores, as they are commentaries rather than research papers, they are not included in Carbon Brief\u2019s leaderboard. (Commentaries are typically commissioned by journal editors, rather than being part of an open submission process. They are also not routinely peer-reviewed. Carbon Brief does include review and perspective articles in the leaderboard, however, as these tend to follow a more traditional editorial process, though this varies by journal. For more on the different types of journal articles, see the guidelines given by Nature<\/a> and Science<\/a> as examples.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Landing the coveted number one spot in 2019 is \u201cNew elevation data triple estimates of global vulnerability to sea level rise and coastal flooding<\/a>\u201d, published in Nature Communications in October, with an Altmetric score of 7,136. This paper was placed seventh in Altmetric\u2019s own Top 100 research papers of 2019<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Top 5<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Just missing out on top spot, in second place is \u201cThe global tree restoration potential<\/a>\u201d in the journal Science, with an Altmetrics score of 6,354.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This study, led by Dr Jean-Francois Bastin<\/a> \u2013 a postdoctoral researcher at the Crowther Lab<\/a> at ETH Zurich<\/a> \u2013 mapped \u201cthe global potential tree coverage to show that 4.4bn hectares of canopy cover could exist under the current climate\u201d. The study estimates that there is \u201croom for an extra 0.9bn hectares\u201d of trees, which has the potential to store 205bn tonnes of carbon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elsewhere in the Top 25<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Just outside the Top 10, in 11th place with a score of 2,767, is the Science Advances paper \u201cAcceleration of ice loss across the Himalayas over the past 40 years<\/a>\u201d. Using satellite imagery, the study finds a \u201cdoubling of the average loss rate\u201d of Himalayan ice during 2000-16 compared to 1975-2000. The study featured in 349 news stories \u2013 more than any other in the list outside the Top 4.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 12th is another Lancet paper, with the longest title of any in the Top 25: \u201cThe 2019 report of The Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: ensuring that the health of a child born today is not defined by a changing climate<\/a>\u201d. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Lancet Countdown is an \u201cinternational, multidisciplinary collaboration, dedicated to monitoring the evolving health profile of climate change, and providing an independent assessment of the delivery of commitments made by governments worldwide under the Paris Agreement\u201d. Carbon Brief<\/a> reported on the 2018 edition of the report, which warned that extreme heat threatens \u201csystemic failure\u201d of the world\u2019s hospitals. Read more …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CSTPR’s MeCCO work for Lancet Report (#12 most featured in the media) highlighted in Carbon Brief Last year saw the rise of climate change protests, with Greta Thunberg, school strikes and Extinction Rebellion generating global news coverage. The impacts of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-02 12:57:08","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category"},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4082"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4082\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4085,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4082\/revisions\/4085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}