Elizabeth Kolbert – WHY SCIENTISTS ARE SCARED OF TRUMP: A POCKET GUIDE

Next week, the American Geophysical Union will hold its annual conference in San Francisco. The A.G.U. meeting is one of the world’s première scientific gatherings—last fall, some twenty-four thousand experts in fields ranging from astronomy to volcanology attended. This year, in addition to the usual papers and journals, a new publication will be available to participants. It’s called “Handling Political …

The world’s wet regions are getting wetter, the dry regions are getting drier

Research from the University of Southampton has provided robust evidence that wet regions of Earth are getting wetter and dry regions are getting drier but it is happening at a slower rate than previously thought. The study, published in Scientific Reports, analysed the saltiness of the world’s oceans. More rain and outflow from rivers in a region of an ocean …

Nadia Prupis – ‘Game Over’ for Climate? Report Warns Warming Is Still Underestimated

Greenhouse gases are rising so fast that it could soon be “game over” for the climate, a leading scientist warned in response to a new study published Wednesday that finds the planet could be heading for more than 7°C warming within a lifetime. The study, published in the journal Science Advances, reported that the United Nations’ most accurate estimates on …

Melting ice sheet could release frozen Cold War-era waste

Climate change could remobilize abandoned hazardous waste thought to be buried forever beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet, new research finds. Camp Century, a U.S. military base built within the Greenland Ice Sheet in 1959, doubled as a top-secret site for testing the feasibility of deploying nuclear missiles from the Arctic during the Cold War. When the camp was decommissioned in …

John Michael Greer – CLIMATE CHANGE ACTIVISM: A POST-MORTEM

As I write these words, much of North America is sweltering under near-tropical heat and humidity. Parts of the Middle East have set all-time high temperatures for the Old World, coming within a few degrees of Death Valley’s global record. The melting of the Greenland ice cap has tripled in recent years, and reports from the arctic coast of Siberia …

Farms have become a major air-pollution source

A new study says that emissions from farms outweigh all other human sources of fine-particulate air pollution in much of the United States, Europe, Russia and China. The culprit: fumes from nitrogen-rich fertilizers and animal waste that combine in the air with industrial emissions to form solid particles — a huge source of disease and death. The good news: if …

Unhealthy ozone days could increase by more than a week in coming decades

If emission rates continue unchecked, regions of the United States could experience between three and nine additional days per year of unhealthy ozone levels by 2050, according to a new study from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) published in Geophysical Research Letters. “In the coming decades, global climate change will likely cause more heat …

Alex Kirby – Warming lakes speed up methane emissions

US scientists report that lakes worldwide are warming by an average of more than 1°C every 30 years, faster than the warming rate of either the ocean or the atmosphere. The warming is expected to increase algal blooms and to mean global emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a century, will increase …

Ken Browne – Researchers just discovered a massive body of water under China’s biggest desert

The Tarim basin in Xinjiang, China is a valley the size of Venezuela; bigger than California, New Mexico and Florida put together. On the surface it is home to Taklimakan, China’s biggest desert, but deep beneath lies a hidden ‘ocean’ that is thought to contain up to ten times more water than all the Great Lakes combined, storing more carbon …