Seven ways we can fight back against flooding
Feb 04, 2016 15:14 pm UTC| Nature
There is no panacea for flood events, but there a range of things we can either do better or start doing to mitigate or adapt to them. The recent UK floods caused by Storm Desmond in the first week of December 2015 were...
Good news on rain forests: they bounce back strong, storing more carbon than thought
Feb 04, 2016 01:19 am UTC| Insights & Views Nature
When you cut and burn a tropical forest, youre left with a barren plain of cracked red mud, incapable of supporting life the opposite of the teeming, hyperdiverse array of life that was destroyed. Once the trees are gone,...
A cold winter has hit the manufacturing sector in Singapore
Feb 03, 2016 02:25 am UTC| Commentary Economy Nature
Singapore PMIs for Jan15 have indeed gotten worse. In the month the headline manufacturing PMI dipped by 0.5pt to 49.0. Electronics PMI also fell, to 48.5, down from 48.9 in the previous month. All key sub-indexes are...
Hasta la vista El Niño - but don’t hold out for ‘normal’ weather just yet
Jan 28, 2016 02:53 am UTC| Insights & Views Nature
Australias rainfall is perhaps the most variable of any continent on Earth. When averaged across the country, rainfall in 2015 was only slightly below normal. However, there were large areas of both extreme dry and...
The science _for_ climate change only feeds the denial: how do you beat that?
Jan 27, 2016 05:31 am UTC| Insights & Views Nature
As the scientific consensus for climate change has strengthened over the past decade, the arguments against the science of climate change have been on the increase. Thats the surprise finding of a study, published in...
We just had the hottest year on record – where does that leave climate denial?
Jan 25, 2016 10:40 am UTC| Insights & Views Nature
At a news conference announcing that 2015 broke all previous heat records by a wide margin, one journalist started a question with If this trend continues… The response by the Director of NASAs Goddard Institute for...
Weird weather? Blame the North Atlantic
Jan 23, 2016 08:51 am UTC| Insights & Views Nature
Whether dubbed climate extremes or global weirding, we have been witnessing some surprising and concerning weather events. In Europe, seasons seem to be changing, but not consistently. Since the turn of the millennium, the...
Johannesburg in a time of darkness: Ivan Vladislavić’s new memoir reminds us of the city’s fragility
Economist Chris Richardson on an ‘ugly’ inflation result and the coming budget
IceCube researchers detect a rare type of energetic neutrino sent from powerful astronomical objects