Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak — sooner than you think.

It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.

Even when we train our eyes on climate change, we are unable to comprehend its scope. This past winter, a string of days 60 and 70 degrees warmer than normal baked the North Pole, melting the permafrost that encased Norway’s Svalbard seed vault — a global food bank nicknamed “Doomsday,” designed to ensure that our agriculture survives any catastrophe, and which appeared to have been flooded by climate change less than ten years after being built. [...read more]

Winter has descended on North Dakota. A blizzard swept through the state earlier this week, shutting down nearly 300 miles of interstate highway there. And the weather doesn't promise to relent in the coming months.

In the midst of it all, a large group of protesters remains at the temporary camps on the northern edge of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.

The movement, which started in early 2016, had small roots but grew into the thousands, drawing support from Native Americans from across the country, as well as activists who joined in solidarity against the proposed route of the 1,172-mile Dakota Access Pipeline just north of the reservation.

Last week those protests won a concession from the federal government: The Army Corps of Engineers announced it would deny the permit necessary to build the oil pipeline in that area. And now, with an eye toward the impending winter weather, the chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe in North Dakota is asking people camping near the route to go home... [read more]

This year, the hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica has grown larger, and formed later, than at any point in recent years. Expanding to a hole the size of North America, it makes the 2015 hole area the fourth largest on record.

While the gap in the ozone is known to expand and contract over the year, it is still largely the result of man-made chemicals that were pumped into the atmosphere during the 1980s. Scientists at NASA have, however, said that there is no need to panic, as the long-term trends show that the ozone is still on track to recover.

“While the current ozone hole is larger than in recent years, the area occupied by this year's hole is consistent with our understanding of ozone depletion chemistry and consistent with colder-than-average weather conditions in Earth's stratosphere, which help drive ozone depletion,” Paul Newman, chief scientist for Earth Sciences at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, explained in a ...Read more

IN NOVEMBER 2011 an American icebreaker, USCGC Healy, set off from Seward, Alaska, to sail north through the Arctic Circle into the Chukchi Sea. It was the beginning of the winter-long polar night. Sea ice was forming. The sun did not appear in the northern Chukchi for weeks. Those on board expected creatures to be sparse in number and entering hibernation. Instead, they found a ferment of activity.

Robert Campbell of the University of Rhode Island, one of Healey’s supercargo of scientists, outlined the details at Arctic Frontiers, a scientific conference held in Tromso, Norway, last month. His research, and that of his colleagues, showed that planktonic animals such as copepods (pictured above) and krill were abundant, active and grazing on the still smaller algae of the phytoplankton, themselves adapted to manage with the tiniest sliver of winter light. Instead of hibernating, they were developing ...Read More »

The trend of disappearing summer sea ice in the Arctic is clear even though there is always some variability from year to year. Severe winter weather underscores the importance of keeping track of significant trends. Here are the numbers, according to Julienne Stroeve, of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., as reported in the Economist in February:

“Between 1953 and 2014, the average area of the Arctic sea ice shrank by 48,000 square kilometers a year.”

“Between 1979 and 2014, it shrank by 87,000 square kilometers a year.”

“Between 1996 and 2014, the rate rose to 148,000 square kilometers.”

The accelerating rate is explained in part by the fact that ice reflects sunlight but water, which is darker, absorbs it. So as water replaces ice, more heat is retained. Heat transported from lower latitudes could also be part of the explanation ...Read More »

Mad as a hornet, a bumblebee buzzes her wings in vain against the walls of the vial holding her captive. She alights briefly on the paper tab indicating her number, and then resumes scuttling around her plastic prison.

Her warden is Shaina Helsel, one soldier in a citizen army that is taking a census of Maine's bumblebees in an effort to secure the future of the state's blueberries, cranberries and tomatoes amid concern about the population of pollinators.

"Time, location, elevation play a factor in what species are where," says Helsel, a biology student at University of Maine at Augusta. "It's an interesting thing, going out and finding a bunch of different bumblebees. I've so far collected 105." ...Read More »

Chert Hollow Farm sits nestled between rows of tall trees and a nearby stream in central Missouri. Eric and Joanna Reuter have been running the organic farm since 2006. That means they don't plant genetically modified crops and can only use a few approved kinds of chemicals and fertilizers.

"We've traditionally raised about an acre and a half of pretty intensively managed produce, so it's a very productive acre and a half," Eric Reuter says.

Their neighbors grow acres of conventional corn and soybeans, and they mostly got along. That is until one July evening in 2014. Joanna Reuter was transplanting some broccoli when a sound caught her attention.

"I basically heard this loud noise," she says. "It was coming north to south, and I basically yelled, 'What the 'beep' is that?' "