As Notre Dame burned, as the flames leapt from its roof of ancient timbers, many of us watched in grim horror. Hour after hour, on screen after screen, channel after channel, you could see that 850-year-old cathedral, a visiting spot for 13 million people annually, being gutted, its roof timbers flaring into the evening sky, its steeple collapsing in a ball of … Continue reading Suicide watch on planet Earth →

As villagers along the Sunda Strait were finishing their meals on the evening of 22 December last year, they had no idea of the cataclysmic event that awaited them. After bubbling on and off for months, the active volcano of Anak Krakatoa erupted, triggering a 0.3-kilometre-cubed sized chunk of rock to plunge into the unusually … Continue reading Mapping Armaggedon: Earth’s looming tsunamis and mega-quakes →

President describes scale of disaster as huge, as Red Cross says most of Beira damaged or destroyed More than 1,000 people are feared dead in a devastating cyclone that hit Mozambique on Friday, the country’s president has said. Filipe Nyusi told Mozambican radio he had seen “many bodies” floating in the overflowing Pungwe and Busi rivers. … Continue reading Cyclone Idai: more than 1,000 feared dead in Mozambique →

A UN report on shrinking species turns the focus away from bumblebees and on to us. It’s time for humanity to take notice For a global hazard to really get respect these days it has to threaten Armageddon. Climate change, for example, is the stuff of apocalyptic movies: it is about flooding, fire, and famine. The loss … Continue reading We’ve had an apocalyptic warning: now will we care about biodiversity? →

The planet is getting warmer in catastrophic ways. And fear may be the only thing that saves us. The age of climate panic is here. Last summer, a heat wave baked the entire Northern Hemisphere, killing dozens from Quebec to Japan. Some of the most destructive wildfires in California history turned more than a million acres to ash, along … Continue reading Time to Panic →

Volcanic eruptions, floods, disease outbreaks and insect migrations that were witnessed across the Earth recently all have perfectly logical scientific explanations, but at the same time could possibly be interpreted as dire portents for things to come. Severe natural disasters and peculiar phenomena that often get interpreted as some kind of divine punishment are hardly anything new … Continue reading Apocalypse How: Events Resembling ‘Biblical Plagues’ Sighted Around the Globe →

The geological rupture responsible for the devastating magnitude-7.5 earthquake that struck Palu, Indonesia, in September 2018 ripped through Earth’s crust at rare high speed, two teams of scientists reported this week. This “supershear” behavior likely intensified the shaking in the quake, which triggered a tsunami and killed more than 2000 people. And the setting, on … Continue reading Indonesian earthquake broke a geologic speed limit →

“High impact weather” has gripped much of the world so far this year, the UN weather agency, WMO, reported on Friday, with “dangerous and extreme cold in North America, record high heat and wildfires in Australia, heavy rains in parts of South America, and heavy snow on the Alps and Himalayas. The WMO assessment of January’s weather, published … Continue reading World in grip of ‘high impact weather’ as US freezes, Australia sizzles, parts of South America deluged →

Sure, we all share this one planet. But the warming Earth is poised to divide — not unite — us. The big picture: One cornerstone of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement is that nations have a shared responsibility to address global warming. But the reality is that climate change won't affect everyone the same way. … Continue reading One planet, divided under global warming →