Heat waves have been laying siege to regional temperature records around the world since the last week of June, as large areas of heat pressure, or heat domes, strewn across the hemisphere, have increased temperatures in relatively mild climates such as Canada, Ireland, Scotland and Siberia, and is being blamed for at least 33 deaths in Canada’s city of Montreal.
One of the key challenges in facing a rapidly-changing climate is accurately predicting how global warming will affect individual regions around the planet: one area may suddenly be stricken with prolonged drought, while another may be inundated with catastrophic flooding. Keeping ahead of potentially disastrous conditions that can lead to situations such as these will be required for policy makers and emergency planners if they are to save lives and livelihoods, but our current climate models still appear to be inadequate in providing the fine details needed. The solution: according to a professor at Columbia University, the secret to our survival lies in the branch of artificial intelligence called machine learning.
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While the world might be making the steady shift away from fossil fuel energy sources, there is concern that avoiding a climatological catastrophe might take more than simply halting our production of carbon dioxide waste, and that our civilization might need to start actively removing excess CO2 from the atmosphere. Numerous companies around the planet have been developing such an idea, a process called "carbon sequestration", including a Canadian company that is looking to do more than just remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere: they plan to recycle the recovered greenhouse gas and use it as a carbon-neutral fuel source.
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A recent large-scale survey of Antarctica’s ice sheets has revealed that the rate of ice melt from the (mostly) frozen southern continent has tripled over the last decade, releasing volumes of water into the ocean on par with the freshwater flow from Greenland. Increasing temperatures from the air above and the ocean below has accelerated the melting of the ice shelves in West Antarctica, and overall ice sheet growth in East Antarctica has slowed. Additionally, the loss of ice mass in the south means that sea level rise will be more pronounced in the north, spelling trouble for populations living in coastal areas, including those of the United States.
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