Nicola Jones

 This year is shaping up to be the worst fire season for Canada yet. This dramatic graph tells the story:   That's an astonishingly large early start; so far 2021 has us beat in terms of area burned, but it's only just the start of June! What's going on? Obviously climate change is making Canada warmer, which is extending the fire season on either end. Climate change is also expected to increase lightning strikes, which account for about half of the fires started in Canada, so that's a factor too. Any one given year will have its ups and downs, but the overall trend is towards more area burned each year. This year has been remarkably hot (the ocean hit a new all-time record for HOTTEST EVER this April), and we've also got a developing El Nino on our hands, which will make the western half of the country hotter and dryer. Here's the chart showing the general trend in area burned so far:   And here's how it's expected to play out in future (reality like...

An essay for Knowable, pegged to World Ocean Day. What does the future hold in store for our oceans?  https://knowablemagazine.org/article/living-world/2023/our-oceans-future-hot-and-troubled

  Does the increasingly common roar of rocket launches have an impact on wildlife, including threatened species living near spaceports in California, Florida and Texas? My story for Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01713-7

Throwback alert! I think I may have been one of the first journalists to throw a spotlight on deep learning as the 'new AI', way back in 2014. Technically, 'deep learning' is a subset of 'machine learning', though the terms are often used interchangeably. https://www.nature.com/articles/505146a   Of course, machine learning is all over the news these days thanks to chat bots like ChatGPT. I'm so curious to see where the technology goes... and what its unintended consequences are. Here are some of my other stories touching on machine learning and other high-tech computing issues. Artificial-intelligence institute launches free science search engine https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18703 Computing: The quantum company https://www.nature.com/articles/498286a  A critical mass of learning at Mila, Canada https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03064-7  How maching learning could improve climate forecasts https://www.nature.com/articles/548379a     ...

In short: yes. Within about a decade. Sigh. Ever since the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, the world has been aiming (perhaps futilely) to stay below 1.5C of warming above pre-industrial times. It has become a magic number, used in media headlines and academic papers as a key threshold.  Looks like we're going to hit 1.5 for a single year sometime in the next 5 years, and consistently sometime in the early 2030s. Yet another reminder to keep emissions low! A 'global stocktake' of how we're all doing on that is now underway, to be presented in November. My story for Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01702-w

As oceans warm, here's a side-effect you might not have heard of: the water is losing dissolved oxygen. What will happen if and when fish can't breathe? My feature for Yale. https://e360.yale.edu/features/as-ocean-oxygen-levels-dip-fish-face-an-uncertain-future

The global ocean surface waters hit a new record high temperature this April, at an average of 21.1C. Sounds nice for swimming, but not so nice for corals. With an El Nino on its way, expect some wild weather this year: storms in Peru; wildfires in Australia; marine heatwaves aplenty. My story for Nature. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01573-1