“We [seem to] have a 100-year flood every two years now,” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo says he told President Barack Obama during his tour of the damage from Hurricane Sandy on Tuesday. The remark is in the spirit of what climate scientists have been saying about the rise in “extreme weather events,” sea level [...]

Of course you know that polar ice sheets and glaciers are melting, and that as a result, sea level is starting to rise. But once you take in a new multimedia book, Deep Water, by Daniel Grossman, you’ll feel the changes in your gut. You will also have a good sense for how scientists are [...]

SAN FRANCISCO—A mantra that has driven global negotiations on carbon dioxide emissions for years has been that policy-makers must prevent warming of more than two degrees Celsius to prevent apocalyptic climate outcomes. And, two degrees has been a point of no return, a limit directly or indirectly agreed to by negotiators at international climate talks. [...]

p>Mimicking volcanoes by throwing particles high into the sky. Maintaining a floating armada of mirrors in space. Burning plant and other organic waste to make charcoal and burying it—or burning it as fuel and burying the CO2 emissions. Even replanting trees. All have been mooted as potential methods of “geoengineering“—”deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary [...]

It’s not just Nate Silver. Certainly Silver’s election math beat-down is the most noteworthy example of science delivering a dope slap to superstition, to “gut feeling,” to magical thinking: “Come on, you knuckleheads.” But reality is striking back everywhere – in some places with a kind of fierce appropriateness that borders on comedy, or tragedy, [...]

Talk about eery timing. The current special issue of Scientific American is about cities, and as I type this, Hurricane Irene is making her way up the Atlantic seaboard and is expected to reach New York City by Sunday morning. I, like nearly everyone else, am refreshing news pages, blog posts, and scanning my Twitter [...]