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The World Meteorological Organization is forecasting a possible return of the El Niño phenomenon to the Pacific Ocean later this year, hot on the heels of the 2015-2016 back-to-back El Niño events, with only a short-lived, milquetoast La Niña cooling period having occurred in between.

The WMO, drawing on recent observations, climate models and historical trends, predicts that there is a 50-60 percent chance of a reoccurrence of El Niño before 2017 ends. Regional El Niño-associated warming in the Eastern Pacific has already caused heavy rains in Peru and Ecuador, leading to extensive flooding. The sea surface temperatures in the far eastern tropical Pacific have been 2ºC above normal during February and March.
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A series of power outages across the continent that occurred on April 21 may have been caused by a geomagnetic storm. Coordinated cyberattacks were initially blamed for the events, although a fire caused by an overloaded circuit breaker in one of the major outages ruled out that theory. However, it is possible that a geomagnetic storm may have caused the near-simultaneous outages, as there had been an ongoing solar storm at the time.
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The results of two new studies regarding Antarctic glaciers have been released, and the results of each shocked the researchers conducting them, including the first on-site survey of the Totten Ice Shelf, and the first large-scale survey of the Antarctic continent as a whole. Additionally, the results of the two studies do not paint an optimistic picture for the stability of our southern continent’s glaciers.
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According to data released by the U.S. Department of Energy, carbon emissions from power generating plants in the United States fell by five percent last year, in addition to a five percent drop seen earlier in 2015. This decrease is the first one experienced in the more than forty years since record-keeping on CO2 emissions began, and in 2016 overall carbon emissions in the U.S. dropped by 1.7 percent, with emissions from vehicles now outpacing electrical generation.
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