The nation’s top scientists and spies are collaborating on an effort to use the federal government’s intelligence assets — including spy satellites and other classified sensors — to assess the hidden complexities of environmental change. They seek insights from natural phenomena like clouds and glaciers, deserts and tropical forests.

Scientists and policymakers are considering a range of geoengineering options to address the consequences of climate change, dismayed by the prospects of reaching a political agreement to reduce emissions and unnerved by new findings that indicate that the climate could shift in sudden and unpredictable ways.

Scientists debate what effect the sun's current drop in activity, "the deepest solar minimum in almost 100 years", is having on global temperatures.

Six months is all it took to flip Europe’s climate from warm and sunny into the last ice age, researchers have found. They have discovered that the northern hemisphere was plunged into a big freeze 12,800 years ago by a sudden slowdown of the Gulf Stream that allowed ice to spread hundreds of miles southwards from the Arctic.

China's recent cloud seeding effort has some researchers and international legal experts considering whether there should be more discussion now on extending existing international law and agreements (ex. the 1976 Environmental Modification Convention) to control the effects of unilateral geoengineering.

The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say.

Researchers have warned for years of a nightmare global warming scenario caused by melting Arctic freshwater overwhelming the North Atlantic current, and triggering rapid climate change. However, new research indicates that the current rate of glacial melt is occurring at a more gradual pace which will "give ecosystems more time to adjust to new conditions."

Researchers have warned for years of a nightmare global warming scenario caused by melting Arctic freshwater overwhelming the North Atlantic current, and triggering rapid climate change. However, new research indicates that the current rate of glacial melt is occurring at a more gradual pace which will "give ecosystems more time to adjust to new conditions."

The American Meteorological Society has become the first major scientific body to endorse research into geoengineering as part of a three-pronged approach to coping with climate change, alongside national policies to reduce emissions.