Dry is the new normal: Southwest U.S. has gotten drier and more prone to droughts

Feb 11, 2016 07:01 am UTC| Insights & Views Nature

A few large weather systems make all the difference between a wet and a dry year in the Southwest. Coming during the winter and spring, they account for the bulk of the rain and snow the regions receives. My colleagues...

Climate Change Series

Will extreme weather events get Americans to act on climate change?

Feb 07, 2016 15:49 pm UTC| Insights & Views Nature

Scientists are drawing a link between climate change and extreme weather events with increasing confidence. An American Meteorological Society report, for example, studied 28 individual weather events occurring in...

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...

Climate Change Series

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...

Climate Change Series

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...