Iraq’s farmlands are declining due to lack of rainfall and depleted soils, a report by the country’s Central Bureau of Statistics has revealed. Wheat and barley were affected particularly hard, the report said, but it also observed a general decline in the yield per acre of Iraq’s farmland due to “off-season rainfall and dust storms”.

Modern meteorological data collection gives us an unprecedented view into the real-time growth, track, and death of tropical cyclones. Recently, we watched as Hurricane Florence started as a tropical wave off the west coast of Africa, grew into a storm with Category 4 winds, and then made landfall on September 14 near Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina. At that point, with sustained winds down to 90 miles-per-hour, Florence was classified as merely a Category 1 storm. But after moving rapidly across the Atlantic, Hurricane Florence had slowed to a crawl before hitting the Carolina coast, turning the storm into a rain bomb that dropped more precipitation — 36 inches in one town — than all previous U.S. tropical cyclones save one, last year’s Hurricane Harvey. Fears of coastal flooding were rapidly replaced by the reality of prolonged, inland flooding.

The study, by Dr Indrani Roy at the University of Exeter, suggests that the natural phenomena such as solar eleven-year cycles and strong volcanic explosions play important roles in recent climate change which has been ‘underestimated’.

Heat and lots of rainfall, thanks in part to Hurricane Florence, were the key factors in last month’s ranking as fourth hottest and third wettest September on record for the contiguous United States.

Polar bears likely survived past warm periods in the Arctic, when sea ice cover was low, by scavenging on the carcasses of stranded large whales. This food source sustained the bears when they were largely restricted to land, unable to roam the ice in search of seals to hunt.

As Hurricane Michael barrels toward the U.S. states along the northwestern Gulf of Mexico, and Tropical Storm Leslie lingers in the Central Atlantic, Tropical Storm Nadine has formed off the west coast of Africa in the far eastern Atlantic. NASA-NOAA’s Suomi NPP satellite provided a visible image of the new named storm.

Satellite images revealing an Arctic ice cap destabilizing at “unexpected and unprecedented” speed have scientists questioning the long-term stability of some of the Earth’s polar ice caps.

NASA’s Aqua satellite peered into Hurricane Sergio with infrared light to determine if the storm was intensifying or weakening. Infrared data showed cloud top temperatures were getting warmer on the western half of the storm, indicating the uplift of air in storms had weakened.

The world is losing trees faster than ever. An area the size of Italy disappeared last year. Or did it? New research suggests three-quarters of those lost forests may already be regrowing. That hardly means we are out of the woods. Fighting climate change and protecting biodiversity still needs a global campaign to reforest the planet. But it does suggest that, given the chance, nature will do much of the work.

Over the course of a month, we’ve seen tropical cyclone activity in the Atlantic basin heat up quite a bit – most notably with the landfall of Hurricane Florence, which dumped historic amounts of rain on portions of the Carolinas.