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Media enquiries
For the past 50 years scientists from the Climatic Research Unit have featured in the international media highlighting the latest scientific developments in the field of climate change. Please direct all media enquiries to the UEA media centre.
News and events
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There’s growing evidence of possible life on other planets – here’s why you should still be sceptical
Read moreMay 2025
CRU professor Manoj Joshi writes in The Conversation about recent research on distant planets.
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Pint of Science: Navigating the waters of climate change
Read moreMay 2025
Come join CRU researchers Jane Thurgood and Dan Skinner on 19 May when they discuss their research during Norwich's annual Pint of Science festival.
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Climate models underestimate global decreases in high-cloud amount with warming
Read moreApril 2025
Following a machine learning approach, CRU researcher Sarah Wilson Kemsley, together with Peer Nowack (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) and Paulo Ceppi (Imperial College London), identified a discrepancy between changes in high-cloud amount inferred from observations and projected by climate models. They show that climate models underestimate decreases in high-cloud amount with warming and tend to underestimate the magnitude of associated longwave and shortwave cloud feedbacks. They attribute this discrepancy to a misrepresented thermodynamic control on high-cloud amount in the climate models.
This new study was published in Geophysical Research Letters.
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CRU at the Norwich Science Festival
Read moreFebruary 2025
Meet the artist and the scientists behind the impressive science-in-art treasure, Climate Mural for our Times, hidden inside Norwich's City Hall. Free, no booking required. Thursday 20 February at 11am and again at 5.30pm.
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Persistent humid climate favoured the Qin and Western Han Dynasties in China around 2,200 years ago
Read moreJanuary 2025
A new study comparing the annual growth rings of living trees with those from archaeological wood sampled at the Huangwan tomb suggest that the climate in the modern Gansu province of China may have been consistently wetter around 2,200 years than it is at present. These climate conditions would have favoured an expansion of agricultural activity and thus supported the prosperous Qin and Western Han dynasties that developed in this region during that period.
This new study, co-authored by CRU director Tim Osborn, was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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2024: a record-breaking watershed year for the global climate
Read moreJanuary 2025
The global average temperature for 2024 was 1.53±0.08°C above the 1850-1900 global average, according to the HadCRUT5 temperature series, collated by the Met Office, the University of East Anglia and the National Centre for Atmospheric Science.
Professor Phil Jones awarded an OBE
Read moreJanuary 2025
Many congratulations to Professor Phil Jones, emeritus professor in the School of Environmental Sciences and former director of the Climatic Research Unit. Phil has been made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his services to climatology, in the 2025 New Year's Honours list.
Interactive Atlas on each country's contribution to climate change now available
Access the Country Contributions Atlas from the CRU Data pageDecember 2024
How do we know who contributed what to climate change? Our research to quantify the contributions to observed global warming from each country's greenhouse gas emissions has been put into an interactive atlas so you can explore contributions from each country.
Revised historical record sharpens perspective on global warming
Read moreNovember 2024
In the 100th piece published by Climatic Research Unit authors in Science or Nature since CRU was founded in 1972, Tim Osborn and John Kennedy provide context for recent research that suggests that early 20th century global warming was much weaker than most datasets show.
Interactive Wildfire Atlas now available
Access the Wildfire Atlas from the CRU Data pageAugust 2024
Matt Jones and Esther Brambleby published our interactive wildfire atlas to coincide with the publication of the inaugural State of Wildfires 2023-2024 report...
UEA academic receives award from the Royal Meteorological Society
Read moreMay 2024
Daniel Skinner, Senior Research Associate based in the Climatic Research Unit, School of Environmental Sciences has been named the newest recipient of The Malcolm Walker Award for New Environmental...
National Contributions to Warming
Read moreFebruary 2023
Our collaborative research has generated a new database, revealing how countries have contributed to global warming through their emissions of key greenhouse gases since 1850. Read this full article at National Contribution to Warming.
CRU at Norwich Science Festival
February 2023
Tours of the Climate Mural are on 17 February.
As well as this, Emily Wallis and Sarah Wilson Kemsley of CRU are running the “Norwich Climate Explorers” stand on the 17th February. The event takes a look back at Norwich’s historical events, set to the backdrop of the CRU temperature time series, instead of time as the public will be used to. We hope to demonstrate a range of different tools that scientists have used to construct the historical time series (i.e., from thermometers to ice cores). Alongside looking back, we take a look forward. An aerial view of a neighbourhood representing the Norwich of Tomorrow can be built upon by the public using play-doh to envisage a climate-conscious neighbourhood. We are hoping this might look like a neighbourhood filled with play-doh solar panels, trees, and bike lanes; though who knows what creations we might end up seeing. This is all set to a backdrop of the CRU temperature time series, a sample of climate projections, and the climate stripes.
50 Years of UEA's Climatic Research Unit
Read moreMarch 2022
Professor Tim Osborn, Research Director of CRU:
In 2022 we celebrate UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) turning 50! I am looking forward to a diverse range of exciting celebratory events to mark this important year for CRU, which is widely recognised as one of the world's leading institutions concerned with the study of climate change.
New global temperature visualisations
January 2020
A new set of visualisations of our global temperature datasets are now available, updated each month. They show temperature changes from our HadCRUT4 (land and oceans) and CRUTEM4 (land only) datasets, which we produce in collaboration with the Met Office.
The graphs show global, Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere temperature changes on timescales from years to decades, as well the current year so far.