Before 2015, many scientists knew that a "nuclear winter" theoretically could bring major climate change to the world and create famines in many countries. But it wasn’t until the aftermath of the use of a hundred atomic bombs by Pakistan and India – in what was later named the South Asian Nuclear War – that people everywhere began to comprehend the longer-term, global effects of nuclear exchanges…Alan Robock, now a senior professor in environmental science at Rutgers University, was a young scientist studying nuclear winter at that time. Today, the 63-year-old researcher is warning anyone who will listen that although the Cold War ended in the early 1990s, and the risk of a Third World War now appears to be reduced, the danger of nuclear winter persists.

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If you live in a suburb or a rural area, from Albany down through North Carolina, you may notice any day now that dozens of holes, maybe half an inch across, have mysteriously appeared in the ground around trees and shrubs…The chirp of a single Magicicada septendecim, a type of cicada, is hardly noticeable. The simultaneous chirping of a million of them – a very rough estimate of how many insects will populate each infested acre – is not quite deafening, but it’s certainly overwhelming…The Rutgers University entomologist George Hamilton describes listening to them years ago: "You couldn’t hear a radio, even turned up all the way, because of the singing."

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Today’s downpour makes for an ugly day, but it’s a beautiful sight for allergy sufferers. All this rain should scrub the air from pollen giving a bit of relief to those runny noses and itchy eyes. Earlier this week, the tree pollen count was as high as it has been in the last 5 years, according to Leonard Bielory, a specialist in allergy and immunology with the Rutgers Center of Environmental Prediction and physician at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital.

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Environmental changes from climate warming are hitting the Arctic harder and faster than anyone predicted. This week, top Arctic scientists have been meeting in Anchorage looking for better ways to investigate and even track the changes and what they could mean…A really big one is weather, and if a connection can be drawn between changing conditions in the Arctic and extreme weather elsewhere. That has become a specialty for committee member Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University.

Read the entire article at AlaskaPublic.org »