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Climate scientists believe they have found evidence to suggest that the loss of floating Arctic sea ice in the Barents and Kara seas north of Scandinavia can affect the global circulation of air currents and lead to bitterly cold winds blowing for extended periods in winter over Central Asia and Europe, including the UK.

the cooling effect is unlikely to last beyond this century

Rising global temperatures will eventually cancel out any localised cooling caused by loss of Arctic sea ice, although they said it is not possible to predict when this will happen.

The current El Nino weather phenomenon is expected to peak between October and January and could turn into one of the strongest on record, experts from the World Meteorological Organization said at a news conference on Tuesday.

waters in the east-central Pacific Ocean are likely to be more than 2 degrees hotter than average,

Arctic warming effect at work on the Atlantic jetstream current.

California is in its sixth year of drought, which was barely dented by rains brought by the El Niño climate event and sparked a range of water restrictions in the state. But warming temperatures and uncertain rainfall mean that if more isn’t done to slow climate change, droughts lasting 35 years are likely to blight western states by the end of the century, according to the study, published in Science Advances.

Such a megadrought would impose “unprecedented stress on the limited water resources”

the study predicts a 70% chance of a megadrought by the end of the century,

Thus, the migration in response to the severe and prolonged drought exacerbated a number of the factors often cited as contributing to the unrest, which include unemployment, corruption, and rampant inequality. The conflict literature supports the idea that rapid demographic change encourages instability. Whether it was a primary or substantial factor is impossible to know, but drought can lead to devastating consequences when coupled with preexisting acute vulnerability, caused by poor policies and unsustainable land use practices in Syria’s case and perpetuated by the slow and ineffective response of the Assad regime [emphasis added].

suggests that an unprecedented drought accentuated frustration with the Assad regime and led to migration from rural to urban areas.

While climate change will probably increase the number and intensity of heavy showers, leading to more frequent landslides, intensive logging and government negligence in permitting new construction in these areas cause the real disasters.

IN 2007 a Russian-led polar expedition, descending through the icy waters of the Arctic Ocean in a Mir submarine, planted a titanium Russian tricolour on the sea bed 4km (2.5 miles) beneath the North Pole. “The Arctic has always been Russian,

Denmark has staked a claim to the North Pole, too. On December 15th it said that, under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), some 900,000 square kilometres of the Arctic Ocean north of Greenland belongs to it (Greenland is a self-governing part of Denmark).

Canada, which plans to assert sovereignty over part of the polar continental shelf (

As a measure of this efficiency, greenhouse gases are often assigned a value for "Global Warming Potential" (GWP). This value is simply a comparison of the efficiency of a gas relative to CO2 over a time span of 100 years. Therefore a gas with a GWP of 20 is 20 times more efficient at retaining heat than CO2 over a 100 year time period.

the restaurants are still empty, FOR SALE signs are increasing in store windows, people are still moving away, and this marina on Pointe a la Hache – once packed most afternoons with oystermen bringing in their catch on their small boats, high school kids earning a few bucks unloading the sacks, and 18-wheelers backed up by the dozen to carry them away – is completely devoid of life, save one man, 69-year-old Clarence Duplessis, who cleans his boat to pass the time.

While some phenomena in the Gulf – people getting sick, fishing nets coming back empty – are hard to definitively pin on BP – experts say the signs of ecological and economic loss that followed the spill are deeply concerning for the future of the Gulf. Meanwhile, BP has pushed back hard on the notion that the effects of its disaster are much to worry about, spending millions on PR and commercials to convince Gulf residents everything will be OK.

the Gulf is recovering faster than expected,” Geoff Morrell, a BP senior vice-president for communications, said in an email.