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Microsoft’s MSFT -0.2% billionaire founder Bill Gates is financially backing the development of sun-dimming technology that would potentially reflect sunlight out of Earth’s atmosphere, triggering a global cooling effect. The Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx), launched by Harvard University scientists, aims to examine this solution by spraying non-toxic calcium carbonate (CaCO3) dust into the atmosphere — a sun-reflecting aerosol that may offset the effects of global warming. Widespread research into the efficacy of solar geoengineering has been stalled for years due to controversy. Opponents believe such science comes with unpredictable risks, including extreme shifts in weather patterns not dissimilar to...

EVERY YEAR, WEATHER enthusiasts eagerly watch and wait for signs that the polar vortex, a mass of cold air spinning around the Arctic, might meander south, sending cold and snow into the lower latitudes. Their wait might soon be over—and if you’re not a meteorologist, you may be surprised to learn that it’s because of a recent spike in Arctic temperatures. Specifically, temperatures high in the stratosphere above Siberia. In the first week of January, they increased from about minus 92 degrees Fahrenheit to 8 degrees Fahrenheit. While these “sudden stratospheric warming” events happen to some extent every year, this...

In the span of a week, from late December to early January, temperatures high in the atmosphere above the Arctic jumped by 100 degrees Fahrenheit. While this may sound alarming, it's a natural phenomenon that happens every couple of years, but experts say human-caused climate change may be making these events more likely. The remarkable event is called a Sudden Stratospheric Warming (SSW), and it involves the temperatures 50,000 to 100,000 feet above the ground. It disrupts the typical winter climate pattern in the Arctic stratosphere famously known as the polar vortex, and typically leads to more extreme winter weather...

A potent storm system is targeting the Eastern Seaboard with an array of high-impact and potentially hazardous weather, bringing the worst of the clashing seasons just in time for Christmas. Strong winds, flooding rains and even severe weather are likely, with the risk of a few tornadoes adding to the unwelcome assortment. "We’ll file this one under “things you probably didn’t want from Santa.” Cities such as Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and the nation’s capital are all in line for a wild ride, while cities farther south like Raleigh could be eyeing a tornado threat.The meteorological mess accompanies a...

The Chinese Communist Party has expanded its weather modification program to cover an are more than one and a half times the size of India, coupled with a fivefold personnel increase. In early December, the Chinese government revealed it wanted to “extend the artificial rain and snow program to cover at least 2.1m sq miles (5.5m sq km) of land by 2025..”“The long-term plan envisages that by 2035, the country’s weather modification capabilities would reach an “advanced” level and focus on revitalising rural regions, restoring ecosystems and minimising losses from natural disasters,” a summary of the Chinese Communist Party’s goals...

Unseasonal ice storms hit many parts of Russia on November 18 and 19, 2020, causing power outages, traffic chaos, and the collapse of key infrastructure systems in the Far East. An overnight storm accompanied by strong northerly winds and ice rain -- described by The Siberian Times as 'weather apocalypse' -- caused the collapse of key systems in the Russian Far East on November 19, 2020, leaving at least 120 000 people without electricity. Vladivostok and most of the Primorye region were turned into frozen land, the paper reported, adding that hundreds of power lines were cut by wet snow...

Australia has been hit by more than 2.24 million lightning strikes in just 48 hours as wild weather battered the east coast over the weekend. Storms and damaging winds up to 100km/h wreaked havoc in multiple states, with volunteers responding to hundreds of calls for help. The weather bureau said most of the 2.24 million lightning strikes were recorded in Queensland, NSW and the Northern Territory, with more storms expected this week. The same wave of extreme weather slammed Southern Australia with more than 120,000 lightning strikes on October 22, 2020. In Melbourne’s outer east a woman aged in her...

Could the Gulf have yet another tropical storm soon? It continued to look more likely as of Saturday night, according to the National Hurricane Center. Forecasters said Tropical Depression 28 had formed on Saturday afternoon south of Cuba. It could become Tropical Storm Zeta by Sunday and a hurricane by Tuesday, when it is expected to be in the southern Gulf. Landfall could come anywhere from Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle -- including Alabama’s coast -- on Wednesday. However, it is expected weaken before then to a tropical storm.

A new United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) report confirms how extreme weather events have come to dominate the disaster landscape at the beginning of 21st century. Floods and storms were the most prevalent disaster events, followed by earthquakes, extreme temperatures, landslides, droughts, wildfires, volcanic activity and dry mass movement. UNDRR used statistics from the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) maintained by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) which records disasters which have killed ten or more people, affected 100 or more people, resulted in a declared state of emergency, or a call for international...

232 waterspouts/funnels have been confirmed over the Great Lakes from September 28 to October 4, 2020, in the second world record waterspout outbreak of the year, according to the International Center for Waterspout Research (ICWR). From August 16 to 19, 2020, a short-lived waterspout outbreak produced 88 funnels, setting a new world record waterspout outbreak -- the first of the year. Both outbreaks were a result of Canadian cold air sweeping over the region, which made surface air prone to rise. "There were an average of 33 per day," said ICWR director Wade Szilagyi, also a meteorologist at Environment Canada....

El Nino is over and the change to the La Nina represents cooling. Last week, the Global Warming Policy Forum headlined “La Nina Is Here.” Why the headline? Because the warming El Nino is over and the change to the La Nina represents cooling. Like seasonal and actual climate change it is a regular event, which in physics means logical and predictable. And some cooling is showing up in various charts. Well, in the ones not altered by climate promoters. Can you imagine having any number computer “models” predicting “tipping points” and out-of-control warming, but it never happens? Actually, in...

La Niña is the cool phase of a climate phenomenon called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, often referred to as ENSO. Its warmer, better-known, sibling is known as El Niño, and there is third, neutral phase between those two on the continuum. Specific conditions for the ocean and atmosphere must be present for an El Niño or La Niña weather pattern. In the case of La Niña, below-average sea surface temperatures occur in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. Easterly winds over the equator strengthen, and rainfall usually decreases over the the central and eastern tropical Pacific and increases over...

Hazardous weather outlook [Front Range Colorado]

A new study by the University of Washington-Tacoma argues that one of the reasons why minority communities in inner cities experience hot temperatures in the summer is because of systemic racism. Assistant Professor of Urban Ecology Christopher Schell and the co-authors of the study concluded that systemic racism in city planning leads to fewer trees being planted in low-income neighborhoods and, consequently, higher temperatures. Wealthier “urban residential neighborhoods generally have greater vegetation cover, canopy cover, and plant diversity,” reads the paper, titled “The ecological and evolutionary consequences of systemic racism in urban environments.” “The geographic distribution of urban heat islands...

Much of the southwestern portion of the United States has been gripped by a drought that never seems to end, and there is a tremendous amount of concern that patterns that we witnessed back during the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s may be starting to repeat. In a previous article, I discussed the extreme heat that we have been seeing in the region lately. Phoenix has never had more days in a year when the high temperature has hit at least 115 degrees, and other southwestern cities have been smashing records as well. At the same time, precipitation levels...

We're working to get more details on this story and will update it as soon as we know more. BY MIAMI HERALD The wife of a veteran Miami police officer died after she was trapped for much of a sweltering afternoon in the back seat of his patrol SUV at the family’s Miami Shores home, authorities confirmed on Monday. Investigators are treating the death of Clara Paulino, 56, on Friday as a horrific accident. Detectives suspect that Paulino — as her husband slept inside the home after finishing a midnight shift — climbed into the backseat of his marked Ford...

The Iowa Department of Agriculture is estimating that ten million acres of cropland was impacted by Monday’s derecho windstorm. The storm flattened millions of acres of corn in the central part of the state, but Iowa ag secretary Mike Naig says it’s too soon to say how much of the crop has been lost. “The next week will tells us a lot about the fate of the crop,” Naig says. “There’s a lot of corn that’s laying down and some of that corn will still make a crop. It will be able to stand up and still produce. And other...

VIDEO Last night it became official. The Miami Hurricane Center has declared that Isaias is now the worst named hurricane of the 2020 tropical storm season.

A new study suggests the Mediterranean Sea was the warmest during the Roman Empire than any other time in the past 2,000 years The research, published in Scientific Reports, notes the Mediterranean was 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) warmer "than average values for the late centuries for the Sicily and Western Mediterranean regions.