In the zeal to promote carbon dioxide emissions as a magic bullet to stave off climate change, a lot of other factors were minimized. Soot was a big one, but a new study in PNAS suggests that the…

Clouds, which can absorb or reflect incoming radiation and affect the amount of radiation escaping from Earth's atmosphere, remain the greatest source of uncertainty in global climate modeling. By…

The radioactive ocean plume from the 2011 Fukushima nuclear incident will reach the shores of the US within three years from the date of the incident - but it will be harmless, according to a new…

Satellite pictures of Saharan dust clouds have been in the news all summer - they don't just impact Africa, they even impact air quality in far-away cities like Houston. Clouds of African dust often…

It is well known that there are a lot of knobs turning in climate. Current models are assumption-based, with a set of fixed parameters and a solution that involves converging on an answer, and the…

Lots of people who watch the news see when records, some that have stood for a hundred years, are broken in heat waves. But the increase in minimum daily temperatures is telling a more interesting…

New evidence is helping to solve the mystery surrounding a collapse of the Antarctic ice sheet 23 million years ago. The surface of the East Antarctic ice sheet is so cold that models can only…

The end-Permian mass extinction is the most severe biodiversity crisis in the history of life.  Immediately after the extinction, many marine taxa suffered a dramatic size reduction (i.e., the '…

Wildfires and their witch's brew of carbon-containing particles significantly degrade air quality, damage human and wildlife health, and interact with sunlight to affect climate. Measurements taken…

A recent increase in polar mesospheric clouds - diffuse collections of water ice crystals in the mesosphere near the poles at altitudes of about 50 miles - could be due to a recent increase in…