Iceless Arctic summers now expected by 2050s

 Science News, August 2015

Santa Claus could be treading water sooner than thought. An improved forecast of Arctic sea ice coverage predicts that the region will have its first ice-free summer almost a decade earlier than previously projected.

Carbon dating may soon lead to mismatches

 Science News, July 2015

The accuracy of carbon dating may soon be a thing of the past. Carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels threaten the method’s ability to definitively pinpoint the age of organic materials, new research suggests. The extra carbon flooding the atmosphere dilutes the relative number of radioactive carbon atoms that are vital to the dating method. By 2050, the age of fresh organic matter will appear indistinguishable from material created in A.D. 1050, predicts Heather Graven, an atmospheric scientist at Imperial College London.

Current El Niño coming on strong

 Science News, July 2015

Climate’s “little boy” is back in a big way. El Niño, a weather disruption caused by unusually warm seawater in the eastern Pacific, kicked off in March and could become a whopper, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center reported July 9. The agency predicts that El Niño conditions have a more than 90 percent chance of continuing through the Northern Hemisphere winter and around an 80 percent chance of sticking around through spring.

Wildfire seasons have gotten almost 20 percent longer

 Science News, July 2015

Climate change is setting the world on fire. Between 1979 and 2013, the duration of wildfire seasons increased across 25.3 percent of Earth’s vegetated surface, with net gains on every continent except Australia and Antarctica, researchers report online July 14 in Nature Communications.