Phys.org: Earth science

Connecticut gets snow in the winter, but that's about it for bad weather.

The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the planet's greatest driver of year-to-year climate swings, shapes temperature, rainfall, and extreme weather around the world. Its impact ranges from heat waves and floods to air pollution and disruptions to food security, with growing evidence that these climate fluctuations influence human health and economic growth.

Global efforts to reduce pollution will not be enough to mitigate the worst effects of climate change, scientists say. We will also need to extract over 10 gigatons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year for the next century. However, currently only two gigatons are being removed annually, so we have to rapidly scale up existing methods or come up with new ideas.

Climate change is no longer just about melting ice or hotter summers. It is also a financial problem. Droughts, floods, storms and heat waves damage crops, factories and infrastructure. At the same time, the global push to cut greenhouse gas emissions creates risks for countries that depend on oil, gas or coal.

Weeks after Cyclone Senyar made landfall in northern Sumatra, Indonesia, the province of Aceh continues to struggle. The cyclone passed through the Strait of Malacca in late November, bringing heavy rains and causing widespread flooding in parts of Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. More than 500 people were killed and 250,000 people displaced in Aceh alone.

After a weekend of extreme heat and windy conditions, more than 30 blazes were still burning in Victoria and New South Wales as of Sunday evening, including major fires in the Otways, near the town of Alexandra in central Victoria, and on the NSW-Victoria border near Corryong.

Rivers deliver freshwater, nutrients, and carbon to Earth's oceans, influencing the chemistry of coastal seawater worldwide. Notably, a river's alkalinity and the levels of dissolved inorganic carbon it brings to the sea help to shape regional conditions for marine life, including shellfish and corals. These factors also affect the ability of coastal seawater to absorb carbon dioxide from Earth's atmosphere—which can have major implications for climate change.

The Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers, located in the Amundsen Sea sector of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), are among the fastest-melting glaciers on Earth. Together, they are losing ice more rapidly than any other part of Antarctica, raising serious concerns about the long-term stability of the ice sheet and its contribution to future sea-level rise.

In order to understand currents, tides and other ocean dynamics, scientists need to accurately capture sea surface height, or a snapshot of the ocean's surface, including peaks and valleys due to changes in wind, currents and temperature, at any given moment. In order to more accurately forecast ocean circulation and other processes, climate variability, air-sea interactions and extreme weather events, researchers need to be able to accurately predict sea surface height into the future.

Hydroperoxides are strong oxidants that have a significant influence on chemical processes in the atmosphere. Now, an international research team involving the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research (TROPOS) has shown that these substances also form from α‑keto acids such as pyruvic acid in clouds, rain and aerosol water when exposed to sunlight.

Bushfires are strongly driven by weather: hot, dry and windy conditions can combine to create the perfect environment for flames to spread across the landscape.

Winter weather took hold across the Indo-Gangetic Plain in early January 2026, bringing dense fog and cold temperatures to much of the flat, fertile lands that span from Pakistan and northern India to Bangladesh.

To understand how global warming could influence future climate, scientists look to the Paleogene Period that began 66 million years ago, covering a time when Earth's atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were two to four times higher than they are today.

The world's oceans absorbed a record amount of heat in 2025, an international team of scientists said Friday, further priming conditions for sea level rise, violent storms, and coral death.

Heat waves are becoming commonplace, and so too is high humidity, which can strain the electrical grid, hurt the economy, and endanger human health. But the global prevalence of record-breaking humidity events, some of which approach the physiological limit of what humans can safely handle—and all of which go beyond local expectations and adaptations—has not been widely studied.

Extreme weather events have become significantly more common in the Arctic over recent decades, posing a threat to vital polar ecosystems, according to new research by an international team of scientists.

Australian researchers have discovered a hidden climate superpower of trees. Their bark harbors trillions of microbes that help scrub the air of greenhouse and toxic gases.

Much of the western U.S. has started in 2026 in the midst of a snow drought. That might sound surprising, given the record precipitation from atmospheric rivers hitting the region in recent weeks, but those storms were actually part of the problem.

Greenland, the largest island on Earth, possesses some of the richest stores of natural resources anywhere in the world.

When engineers and planners design roads, bridges and dams, they rely on hydrological models intended to protect infrastructure and communities from 50- and 100-year floods. But as climate change increases the frequency and severity of floods, existing models are becoming less and less reliable, new Cornell research finds.