Antinuclear

As this year’s El Niño forecast becomes increasingly clear, drought-parched Californians are hopeful that the pattern will bring much needed rains to the abnormally dry region.But around the world, the looming El Niño pattern could drive extreme weather patterns and continued droughts, putting millions at risk of starvation due to low agricultural production and lack of water, according to a report released earlier this month by Oxfam.

El Niño is a weather pattern that occurs when ocean temperatures across the equatorial Pacific are abnormally warm, driving extreme weather elsewhere. Some weather forecasters believe that this year’s El Niño could be as severe as the 1997-98 El Niño, which is estimated to have caused the death of some 23,000 people.

Already, droughts along Africa’s eastern coast have left millions without food. In Ethiopia, poor rains have forced some 4.5 million residents to seek food aid, while in Malawi, floods followed by…

The world has a better chance of saving itself from catastrophic global warming now than at any time over the past two decades, according to the scientist behind some of the most alarming predictions ever made for the planet’s future.
Johan Rockström shocked environmentalists in 2009 when he identified nine categories of Nature that were essential for life as we know it, and warned that we had already crossed into dangerous territory on three of them – including climate change.
Rockström, an environmental science professor at Stockholm University and executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, has since transferred a fourth category, deforestation, to his list of “planetary boundaries” in the danger zone, which threaten irreversible, devastating consequences to the planet.
But he has had a dramatic change of heart over global warming, and is more optimistic that the worst of the threat can be contained than he has been…