John Michael Greer – The Coming of the Postliberal Era

One of the big challenges faced by any student of current events is that of seeing past the turmoil of the present moment to catch the deep trends shaping events on a broader scale. It’s a little like standing on a beach, without benefit of tide tables, and trying to guess whether the tide’s coming in or going out. Waves …

Andrew Rice – This is New York in the not-so-distant future

Klaus Jacob, a German professor affiliated with Columbia’s University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, is a geophysicist by profession and a doomsayer by disposition. I’ve gotten to know him over the past few years, as I’ve sought to understand the greatest threat to life in New York as we know it. Jacob has a white beard and a ponderous accent: Imagine if Werner …

Brian K Sullivan – The Strongest El Nino in Decades Is Going to Mess With Everything

It has choked Singapore with smoke, triggered Pacific typhoons and left Vietnamese coffee growers staring nervously at dwindling reservoirs. In Africa, cocoa farmers are blaming it for bad harvests, and in the Americas, it has Argentines bracing for lower milk production and Californians believing that rain is finally, mercifully on the way. Its effects are just beginning in much of …

You ain’t seen nothing yet! Northeast’s Next Winter Is Going to Be Freakishly Cold

“When it comes to the global climate, what happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic. The latest proof comes in new research connecting the unusually brutal winter of 2014–15 along the East Coast of North America to rapidly vanishing summer sea ice on the western side of the Arctic Ocean.” Emily J. Gertz Take Part’s Assoiciate editor …

Australia faces stormy future as temperatures soar By Tim Radford

New research into storm patterns warns that flash floods are likely to sweep across the Australian landscape with increasing intensity, particularly in urban or residential areas. Peak rainfall is predicted to soar with rising surface temperatures as the world’s largest island – and also its smallest continent − experiences ever greater extremes of heat. Civil engineers from the Water Research …

Ocean currents impact methane consumption

Large amounts of methane – whether as free gas or as solid gas hydrates – can be found in the sea floor along the ocean shores. When the hydrates dissolve or when the gas finds pathways in the sea floor to ascend, the methane can be released into the water and rise to the surface. Once emitted into the atmosphere, …

Canadian glaciers face drastic demise

By, Thomas Sumner  April 6, 2015 Science News   The Great White North may lose its glaciers faster than previously thought. A detailed physics simulation of how glaciers melt in a warming world show that Western Canada’s glaciers will shed 70 percent of their ice by 2100 relative to their 2005 volumes, researchers report online April 6 in Nature Geoscience. …