Many European countries had their warmest January since records began, weather offices said, bringing Dutch daffodils out early and triggering grassland fires in Hungary. (Reuters)
The National Weather Service's parent agency, NOAA, announced today it turned on a new set of IBM machines that increase the computational power used for the nation's climate and weather forecasts by 320 percent. (LiveScience.com)
Anchorage has already received 76 inches of snow midway through a season that normally totals 68 inches, forcing the city's moose to adjust their winter habits as they encounter new dangers. (Associated Press)
Average temperatures in Sydney will rise by about 9 degrees during the next 65 years, with devastating consequences including 1,300 more heat-related deaths per year, according to a government study. (Associated Press)
Northern Utah's valleys have been smothered by an "inversion," a blanket of warm air that keeps cold air close to the ground and traps everything: car exhaust, factory emissions, even hard-to-see particles from furnaces or a cozy fireplace. (Associated Press)
A wave of small earthquakes that has caused alarm in southern Chile may be related to the birth of an undersea volcano, officials said. (Associated Press)
An earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 6.7 rocked the coast of Australia's remote Macquarie Island, the U.S. Geological Survey said. (Associated Press)
Australia's famous Great Barrier Reef could be dead within decades because of the effects of global warming, according to the latest IPCC report. (BBC)
A new study shows how North American corn leaves can be used to map how much of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide is being emitted from local fossil fuel burning. (Discovery.com)
Seismic activity is slowly tearing Africa apart and scientists are geared up to watch the ripping landscape in an unprecedented set of observations. (LiveScience.com)
New data shows the melting of mountain glaciers worldwide is accelerating, a clear sign that climate change is also picking up, the UN environmental agency and scientists said. (Reuters)
Rising sea levels because of global warming stand to inundate around 2,000 islands in Indonesia by 2030, the country's environment minister said. (Associated Press)
Up the mountain from the Steamboat Springs Ski Resort, at the Storm Peak Laboratory, atmospheric scientists have studied everything from snow crystals and pollution to the impact of ultraviolet radiation on vegetation, but climate change now tops their priorities. (CNN)
For the first time, a drumlin - a mound of sediment and rock - has been observed mid-formation. (BBC)
Snow and ice caused havoc on roads in parts of Europe, killing four people and leaving 30,000 homes without electricity, officials said. (Agence France-Presse)
World sea levels will keep rising for more than 1,000 years even if governments manage to slow a projected surge in temperatures this century blamed on greenhouse gases, a draft U.N. climate report says. (Reuters)
Winter temperatures are rising steadily across the European Alps but snow volumes have varied wildly, making it harder to assess the risk of avalanches, a Swiss climate expert said. (Reuters)
The caribou population in Canada's vast Northwest Territories is falling rapidly and the increasingly warm climate could slow the animals' chances of recovery, a wildlife specialist said. (Reuters)
Some landowners in the Pacific Northwest are planting new forests of trees to consume greenhouse gases and potentially buffer climate change, in a business called carbon forestry. (Associated Press)
Researchers have come up with a novel way to measure carbon dioxide levels produced by fossil fuels using corn harvested from almost 70 locations around the country. (National Public Radio)
Fifty-three people have died in Luanda, Angola's seaside capital, in torrential rains that have lashed the city for three days, a police spokesman said. (Agence France-Presse)
Pregnant polar bears in Alaska, which spend most of their lives on sea ice, are increasingly giving birth on land, according to researchers who say global warming is probably to blame. (Associated Press)
Human-caused global warming is here and is destined to get much worse in the future, an authoritative global scientific report will warn next week. (Associated Press)
Health officials lessened the impact of an ongoing outbreak in Kenya of Rift Valley Fever, a deadly hemorrhagic fever, after NASA scientists noticed exceptionally warm sea temperatures and elevated rainfall in east Africa four months ago. (Associated Press)
Nearly half of the world's waterbird species are in decline, mostly due to rapid economic development and the effects of climate change, according to a global survey. (Associated Press)
A new study shows that about 14,000 to 36,000 years ago the prevailing wind across much of the mid-latitudes, including the United States, was easterly, and marine moisture came predominantly from the East Coast. (LiveScience.com)
Most glaciers will disappear from the Alps by 2050, scientists told a conference on climate change, basing their bleak outlook on evidence of slow but steady melting of the region's continental ice sheets. (Associated Press)
Some of the perennially frozen ground high in the Himalayas has been shrinking, say Japanese scientists. (Discovery.com)
A powerful earthquake in northeastern Indonesia left four people dead and four injured when it rattled buildings, causing panicked residents to flee homes, churches and shopping malls, officials and witnesses said. (Associated Press)
Killer whales are migrating farther north as the Arctic Ocean's ice cover melts, threatening the livelihood of the native Inuit who traditionally depend on fishing for their food, Canadian researchers said. (Agence France-Presse)
Four people have died and hundreds of homes have been destroyed by torrential rains in Mozambique over the last two days, officials said. (Agence France-Presse)
The old adage that "no two snowflakes are alike" might not hold true, at least for smaller crystals, new research suggests. (Associated Press)
Parts of the world could heat up by over 18 degrees Fahrenheit this century with large areas of land becoming uninhabitable, according to a climate prediction experiment. (Reuters)
A U.N. climate panel is set to give its strongest warning yet that human use of fossil fuels is stoking global warming, informed sources said. (Reuters)
Nitrogen release by decomposing plants is surprisingly similar across the planet and could help shed light on the evolution of climate change, researchers said. (Agence France-Presse)
Hurricane force winds battered parts of Europe, killing at least 27 people and triggering a dramatic air-sea rescue from a sinking cargo ship in the English Channel. (Agence France-Presse)
Subtle environmental change can interact with physiological needs to weaken the ability of a species to maintain a viable population even when the temperature rise is too mild to kill individual organisms. (Christian Science Monitor)
A computer model of climate run on home PCs in conjunction with the BBC has yielded its first results, suggesting the UK could be about 3 degrees Celsius warmer than now in 75 years' time, agreeing with other climate models. (BBC)
By studying climate records stored in coral reefs over the last 6,000 years, researchers found that stronger monsoons in Asia lead to greater cooling in the eastern Indian Ocean, which in turn causes droughts in Australia. (Reuters)
A layer of snow blanketed hills in Malibu, Calif., as Americans coped with a deadly nationwide cold snap that has left hundreds of thousands in the dark and caused billions in crop damage. (Agence France-Presse)
A new index that maps the different ways that climate change will hit parts of the world reveals how much more frequent extreme climate events will be by 2100 compared with the late 20th century. (NewScientist.com)
The current El Nino weather anomaly appears to be fading, and its impact has been muted in North America with normal weather conditions seen this year over the corn and soybean growing region of the Midwest, climate scientists said. (Reuters)
A winter storm that slathered the Midwest and Plains under a thick coat of ice crashed into the Northeast, downing power lines, and making roadways treacherous as the death toll rose to 41. (Associated Press)
All over Greenland and the Arctic, rising temperatures are not simply melting ice, they are changing the very geography of coastlines as "lonely mountains" that were once encased in the margins of Greenland�s ice sheet are being freed, exposing a new chain of islands. (The New York Times)
Satellites have not yet replaced the humble rain gauge when it comes to collecting weather data in the United States, and scientists said they intend to expand the network over the next few years. (Reuters)
Much of the European part of Russia has been gripped by an uncharacteristic warm spell this winter, with temperatures generally well above freezing and little if any snow and temperatures so warm that bears aren't hibernating. (Associated Press)
Beginning Oct. 1, the National Weather Service will begin issuing severe-weather warnings that are more geographically specific rather than being county-wide. (LiveScience.com)
Earthquakes killed 6,604 people worldwide in 2006, down significantly from the previous two years in a stark shift that illustrates the capricious nature of these events. (LiveScience.com)
Three nights of freezing temperatures have destroyed up to three-quarters of California's $1 billion citrus crop, according to an estimate. (Associated Press)
Researchers are going 60 feet underground for a unique archive of California climate records in stalagmites and other cave formations found in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. (San Diego Union Tribune)
More than 100,000 people were evacuated from their homes in southern Malaysia after heavy rains caused massive flooding, officials said. (Agence France-Presse)
Small tsunami waves hit northern and eastern Japan after a powerful 8.2-magnitude earthquake in the Pacific prompted tsunami warnings in Japan, Russia and Alaska. (Reuters)
Italy recorded its warmest December last month since records began in 1860, with an average temperature of 6.9 degrees Celsius (44.4 degrees Fahrenheit), Italian media said, quoting meteorologists at the university of Modena. (Agence France-Presse)
Around 60,000 people have been displaced in Sri Lanka by flooding caused by torrential monsoon rains, the government said, while the death toll from landslides a day earlier rose to 13. (Reuters)
The current El Nino weather anomaly that can create atmospheric havoc around the world should continue into the spring, extending unseasonably warm North American temperatures through March, the U.S. National Weather Service said. (Reuters)
Experts warned Austrian allergy-sufferers that some species of trees are already flowering and about to release pollen � an annual phenomenon that's usually not a problem until well into spring. (Associated Press)
California seismologists launched an earthquake-readiness campaign with the slogan "Shift Happens" on the 150th anniversary of the biggest quake in the state's recorded history. (Associated Press)
The ability to grow like a weed may be advantageous when it comes to coping with climate change as plants with short life cycles can adapt more quickly than those that reproduce slowly, a new study finds. (Associated Press)
Last year was the warmest on record for the United States, with readings pushed higher than normal by the unusual and unseasonably warm weather during the last half of December, government scientists said. (Associated Press)
The volcano that destroyed Montserrat's capital in 1997 shot a cloud of ash more than five miles into the sky, and one of the island's chief scientists said the blast was "a warning call.'' (Associated Press)
The death toll from floods in Malaysia has risen to 17 as fresh heavy downpours forced hundreds to evacuate in the country's north and the eastern state of Sabah. (Reuters)
Firefighters recovered the body of a woman whose home was engulfed in a mudslide, as the death toll from days of heavy rains in southeast Brazil reached 31. (Associated Press)
Temperatures in rugged Tibet have hit record highs in recent days, China's state press said, as a scientific survey warned of the impact of global warming in the Himalayan region. (Agence France-Presse)
Warming oceans, one of the major consequences of global climate change, are making another marine species feel like a fish out of water, scientists report. (Associated Press)
Scientists say recent unseasonably warm winter in the United States fits the pattern of projections long predicted for manmade global warming of more and more frequent unseasonable warm spells. (ABC)
China's largest lake, suffering from global warming and desertification, may vanish in two centuries even as the government pledges $870 million to stop it shrinking, Xinhua news agency said. (Reuters)
Rainfall in the Southern Ocean, combined with Antarctic weather patterns, could hold the key to understanding drought in Australia, and researchers are planning to send remote-control aircraft into storms over the South Pole to find out more. (Australian Broadcasting Corp.)
A resurgent El Nino and persistently high levels of greenhouse gases are likely to make 2007 the world's hottest year ever recorded, British climate scientists said. (Reuters)
Air over some parts of the open southern oceans may be the last vestiges of almost pre-industrial skies. (Discovery.com)
The Tang dynasty, seen by many historians as a glittering peak in China's history, was brought to its knees by shifts in the monsoon cycle, according to a study. (Agence France-Presse)
Australia appears to be suffering an accelerated greenhouse effect, with the pace of global warming faster across the country than in other parts of the world, climatologists said. (Reuters)
Billions of people in China and the Indian subcontinent rely on South Asia's Himalayan glaciers for water supplies, but as global climate change slowly melts glaciers, scientists say the glaciers in the Himalayas are retreating faster than in any other part of the world. (Christian Science Monitor)
A new report by scientists studying Louisiana's sinking coast says the land is not just sinking, it's sliding slowly into the Gulf of Mexico, findings that may add a kink to plans to build bigger and better levees to protect New Orleans. (Associated Press)