The final days of August signaled summer’s end for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere. So, how did this summer compare to others?  

For the entire globe, both August and the season (June, July and August) each went down as the third warmest on record. But depending on where you live, the summer you experienced may have felt warmer or cooler than normal.    

In a detailed talk about the history and the underlying physics of hurricanes and tropical cyclones, MIT Professor Kerry Emanuel yesterday explained why climate change will cause such storms to become much stronger and reach peak intensity further north, heightening their potential impacts on human lives in coming years.

In 2008, Jay Lemery, MD, an emergency physician in Colorado, read a commentary about the effects of global climate change on human health. The author was Paul Auerbach, MD, professor of emergency medicine at Stanford and one of the world’s leading authorities on wilderness medicine.

Many extreme events — from a rogue wave that rises up from calm waters, to an  instability inside a gas turbine, to the sudden extinction of a previously hardy wildlife species — seem to occur without warning. It’s often impossible to predict when such bursts of instability will strike, particularly in systems with a complex and ever-changing mix of players and pieces.

Jose continues to bring tropical storm conditions to southern New England although the storm has become post-tropical. NASA's Terra satellite caught a view of the storm sitting almost stationary about 100 miles from Nantucket Island, Massachusetts.

When the strong winds that circle the Arctic slacken, cold polar air can escape and cause extreme winter chills in parts of the Northern hemisphere.

To find out what works best for reestablishing tropical dry forests, the researchers planted seedlings of 32 native tree species in degraded soil or degraded soil amended with sand, rice hulls, rice hull ash or hydrogel.

NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite provided a look at Maria's temperatures to find the strongest sides of the storm, while NOAA's GOES satellite revealed the extent of the storm in a visible image as it moved toward the Bahamas.

We must move faster towards a low-carbon world if we are to limit global warming to 2 degrees C this century, experts have warned.

Fires that span across the Northern Territory and Western Australia appear to have broken out in areas that have already been burned in previous fires.  Areas that sport "burn scars", those areas that are a darker, almost red-brown color, are surrounded by fires that are anywhere from a few hours old to 7 days old.  The areas that are seven days old can be attributed to fires that spread but areas that are just a few hours old may be fires that have presumably been put out only to have them break out again.  The Northern Territory of Australia experienced a higher than normal amount of rain this past season allowing the plants and trees that fuel fires to become even more overgrown and subject to becoming fire fodder.