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Time just flies by, and that was especially true during the first half of November 2009, when the Earth's daily spin around its axis became 0.1 milliseconds shorter. You can blame that lost time on the waters around Antarctica. More »
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In 1000 years, sea levels could rise as much as 28 meters, placing London, as well as many other cities, squarely underwater. Because it can be difficult to picture just what those rising waters mean, one artist has placed a glowing high-water mark around some of London's most prominent monuments. More »
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We've been recording global surface temperatures since 1880, the beginning of what meteorologists call the modern record. In that time, worldwide temperatures have been on the rise. Now, NASA scientists are reporting that the global average surface temperature in 2011 was the ninth warmest that we've ever recorded. So what's the big deal? In the last 132 years, nine of the ten warmest on record have occurred in the last eleven years.

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Climate change might turn lizards into geniuses, but fish won't be quite so lucky. All the billions of tons of carbon dioxide that enters the oceans each year is like alcohol for fish, turning them into risk-taking idiots. More »
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Just when it seemed like we knew all the dangers of climate change, science has to go and throw us this curveball. Warmer temperatures make lizards' brains develop differently. Last thing we need is some newly super-intelligent lizards judging us. More »
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Back in January 2010, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that they were moving their "Doomsday Clock" from five to six minutes to midnight, a sign of cautious optimism and renewed hope for Earth's nuclear safety. More »
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While politicians battle over climate regulations, a growing number of urban planners and landscape managers are quietly preparing for a more arid world. A fascinating book review in the New York Times today explores two recent books about the future of the American Southwest, a region that is today gripped by drought - and will likely be even drier as the years go by. Writes Cornelia Dean: More »
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The UN's latest Climate Change Conference recently concluded after two weeks of intense negotiations in Durban, South Africa. There's going to be a new agreement to address climate change, but does that really mean anything? Let's break down what happened. More »
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Get excited, people. The critically acclaimed BBC documentary series Frozen Planet is slated to begin airing stateside on March 18th, but here's the really good news: the controversial final episode addressing climate change? It will be airing in the U.S., after all. More »
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The abandoned cities and giant monuments of the Maya, found throughout the Yucatán, are one of the greatest mysteries in human history. Why did this great empire collapse suddenly in 950 AD, leaving its massive urban centers to be consumed by jungle? New evidence suggests that the Mayans may have created such vast farms that they managed to change the local climate in a catastrophic way. More »
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As global temperatures rise and the oceans heat up, a huge question is how fish that are adapted to one set of temperatures will survive this upheaval. Now we know at least one species could adapt fast enough to survive. More »
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Global fossil fuel emissions skyrocketed last year to the highest levels ever recorded, undermining the widespread belief that the global financial crisis would cut carbon emissions. Though there was a brief, two-year decline in emissions, a new scientific report published this week offers compelling evidence that emissions in 2010 soared far above anything we've ever experienced. More »
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There's a famous story about British moths during the Industrial Revolution, who in just a few short generations adapted to their soot-filled environment by evolving a matching black color. And now we've found the global warming equivalent: Dutch ladybugs. More »
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Most climate change predictions have only examined the next hundred years. But now a new, even more long-term model suggests that temperatures could rise as much as ten degrees Celsius by 2300 — creating conditions not seen for 34 million years. More »
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As sea temperatures rise, many fish species will have to relocate to find waters that can support them. But they won't have a lot of time to look for the right new home. For fish, it's survival of the fastest. More »
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What kind of world are we leaving to our grandchildren? Can we even imagine a world after climate change? Some of the world's greatest authors, including David Mitchell and Kim Stanley Robinson, grapple with climate change and our future in a new story collection. Here's a review by Pauline Masurel from Green Prophet. More »
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Here's your first look at a ginormous crack in Western Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier, which is a staggering 18 miles long, 240 feet wide and up to 190 feet deep. The crack appears to be widening, and will send off a 300 square mile iceberg in the next few months, according to NASA. Once that happens, the ice shelf that forms the sea-facing side of the glacier will have retreated to its furthest point since researchers started measuring in the 1940s. More »
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We hear a lot about slowing climate change by recycling, cutting fossil fuel use, and just generally limiting our carbon footprints. But scientists and engineers believe there could be solutions that go beyond that. These are so-called geoengineering solutions, which include everything from squirting particles into the stratosphere to cool the planet, to creating massive carbon sinks that would pull greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. Until recently, such solutions were regarded as wildly speculative. But now they are gaining traction — especially among politicians and policy-makers who previously rejected environmental conservation plans. More »
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How do you draw attention to the Earth's dwindling supply of Arctic Sea ice? Simple: slap a gigantic naked man on it. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5851346&view=rss&microfeed=true Over at the Wall Street Journal, op-edster Robert Bryce has decided that climate change is basically no longer an issue. Mostly he means to say that it's dead as a political issue — he cites the failure of climate talks to produce reasonable carbon taxes and credits. But he doesn't stop there. He thinks it may be dead as a scientific issue, too. More »
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Apparently Boehner isn't alone. Turns out millions of other white, conservative men are skeptical of climate change science; and those who self-identify as having a firm understanding of global warming are even more prone towards climate change denial. More »
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Interested in the future of Earth's climate? Some of the answers might lie in the past, and you can help find them by making notations the weather logs from 238 Royal Navy vessels (like gunboats and battleships) from the turn of the years surrounding the first World War. Old Weather, a collaboration between the University of Oxford, the International Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions over the Earth,and the UK National Archives and others, makes use of citizens like yourself to transcribe logs from which computer projects will be made.

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The last decade was the hottest on record, and yet it wasn't until 2010 that an individual year was hotter than the record-breaking 1998 heatwave. Somehow, global temperatures mysteriously flattened out. The explanation may lie thousands of feet underwater. More »
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Over the past century, we've witnessed a rise in the greenhouse gas methane in our atmosphere. But for a few years at the turn of the millennium, methane levels tapered off and reached a stable state before starting to climb again. If we could just figure out what caused this slowdown, and replicate it, we might be able to alter the course of climate change. More »
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The Ice Age can be explained by some well-placed specks of iron. Adding dust to the waters around Antarctica can supercharge plankton growth, causing global temperature drops. To stop climate change, we need a whole lot of iron filings. More »
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In 1995, the temperature of the Red Sea rose abruptly. It's already-warm waters became 0.7°C hotter, which is a significant amount for a body of water whose reefs support life that's adapted for a very specific temperature. Scientists studying the Red Sea recently published a study using satellite data to prove that the temperature spike led to an overall increase in the sea's temperature over time. More »
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When you hear predictions about climate change, scientists often refer to simple models of gradual transformation. But new evidence suggests that climate change is likely to be abrupt, with the temperature of the planet rising quickly over only a few decades. More »
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It's hard to know where to begin when calculating the effects that climate change might have on our planet, but I'm guessing most people haven't considered the smell factor. Global warming could super-charge the production of a particularly smelly gas. More »
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The fact that sea levels are rising probably won't come as a huge surprise. But we now have some much-needed historical context for the melting icecaps and rising waters...and there's zero doubt that, in geological history, higher sea levels meant higher temperatures. More »
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The Sun has been unusually quiet lately, with the solar wind the slowest it's been in 50 years and the sunspot cycle reduced to nothing more than the occasional belch. But don't believe reports that this spells doom for humanity. More »
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A fjord is a deep valley carved by glaciers. Most famously, fjords were cut into the land by ice melt during Norway's summers, when fast-moving rivers flow between stunningly tall cliffs. Now a group of researchers have discovered that the fjord was also common to Antarctica, back when its eastern ice sheet grew and shrank rapidly every year. More »
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James Jaros' new novel Burn Down the Sky offers a disturbing take on the post-global-warming dystopian setting. Our civilization is no more, thanks to skyrocketing temperatures and a catstrophic water shortage — and then there's the deadly "Wicca" virus. More »
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Previously, scientists had estimated that climate change would lead to glacier melts and sea levels rising by a few centimeters at century's end. Now, a new international study offers a more dramatic picture of our changing coastlines. More »
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Off the Canadian Arctic coast, an archipelago of islands is rapidly losing the sheets of ice that once blanketed them. A group of scientists today published a long-range study of what this means, and documented the changing landscape. More »
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Antarctica is the only continent on Earth where humans haven't set up permanent homes. It's an icy desert that was once a subtropical forest, teeming with life. But scientists believe that the cold land could bloom again. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5790679&view=rss&microfeed=true Futurist and singularitarian Ray Kurzweil recently told PBS' Lauren Feeney that we don't need to worry about peak oil or carbon emissions. That's a relief. He's applied his "law of accelerating returns," developed to describe the way consumer electronics improve exponentially, to the field of solar power. Kurzweil tells Feeney: More »
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University of Arizona geology researcher Jeremy Weiss has been tracking ways that climate change affects sea levels - in the distant past as well as the future. Given the rate of global warming today, he and his colleagues estimate that by 2100, ocean levels with have risen at least a meter. And it will continue to rise after that. What will this do to people who live in coastal cities? Possibly dunk their cities underwater. And in the case of Florida, possibly dunk half your state beneath the waves. Here are a few future waterline maps Weiss has produced - some show us at the waterline predicted for 2100 (about a meter higher), and some show us in 2200 and beyond as the waters keep rising up to 5 meters. More »
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A female polar bear recently swam over 400 miles in water barely above freezing, apparently in search of ice that had not been melted by climate change. It's a tale that's equal parts insane, tragic, and completely terrifying. More »
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Storage of carbon dioxide was supposed to be a boon to the environment in Canada. But are reports of dead animals and bubbling ponds signs that it's a danger? More »
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Climate has been the secret driver of history, particularly in the preindustrial world. Empires and kingdoms rose to power when it was warm and wet and toppled when it became cool and dry...and climate might not be done guiding history. More »
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