The scientists' latest forecast, released June 18, calls for a Gulf dead zone of between 7,450 and 8,456 square miles—an area about the size of New Jersey.

Most likely, this summer's Gulf dead zone will blanket about 7,980 square miles, roughly the same size as last year's zone, Scavia said. That would put the years 2009, 2008 and 2001 in a virtual tie for second place on the list of the largest Gulf dead zones.

London's hottest summer day, which in recent decades has averaged 30.7 degrees Celsius, or 91.6 Fahrenheit, could increase by 10 degrees C to 40.7C or 105.3F, a staggering rise – which would make travel on the London Underground, for example, where the increase would be further magnified, virtually unendurable – with a high probability of increased deaths from heat stress among the old and infirm.

Similar huge increases are forecast for every region of Britain in the first localised forecasts of the potential impacts of global warming. Also for the first time, detailed projections of drought, increased winter rainstorms and sea level rise are made for each area, showing for instance that Southwold, a Suffolk coastal resort already threatened with erosion, faces a sea level rise of 37cm, or 14in, by the 2080s, while London itself could face a similar rise, with the threat of an additional 97cm, or 3ft, of storm surge.

The study, which is being published May 29 in Geophysical Research Letters, finds that if Greenland's ice melts at moderate to high rates, ocean circulation by 2100 may shift and cause sea levels off the northeast coast of North America to rise by about 12 to 20 inches (about 30 to 50 centimeters) more than in other coastal areas. The research builds on recent reports that have found that sea level rise associated with global warming could adversely affect North America, and its findings suggest that the situation is more threatening than previously believed.

"If the Greenland melt continues to accelerate, we could see significant impacts this century on the northeast U.S. coast from the resulting sea level rise," says NCAR scientist Aixue Hu, the lead author. "Major northeastern cities are directly in the path of the greatest rise."

The rise in sea levels would be highest on the west and east coasts of North America where increases of 25 per cent more than the global average would cause catastrophic flooding in cities such as New York, Washington DC and San Francisco.

A study into how the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could respond to global warming has found its disintegration would change the focus of the planet's gravitational field, so sea levels would rise disproportionately more around North America than in other parts of the world. If the ice sheet covering West Antarctica disappears, the loss of so much mass from the southern hemisphere would effectively make the pull of gravity stronger in the northern hemisphere, affecting the spin of the Earth and causing sea levels to rise higher here than in the south, where the mass of ice is currently located.

The collapse of a major polar ice sheet will not raise global sea levels as much as previous projections suggest, a team of scientists has calculated.

Writing in Science, the researchers said that the demise of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) would result in a sea level rise of 3.3m (10 ft). Previous estimates had forecast a rise in the region of five to six metres.

However, they added, the rise would still pose a serious threat to major coastal cities, such as New York.

"Sea level rise is considered to be the one of the most serious consequence of climate change," lead author Jonathan Bamber told the Science podcast.

"A sea level rise of just 1.5m would displace 17 million people in Bangladesh alone," he added. "So it is of the utmost importance to understand the potential threats to coastlines and people living in coastal areas."

A change in the amount of ice is important because the white surface reflects sunlight back into space. When ice is replaced by dark ocean water that sunlight can be absorbed, warming the water and increasing the warming of the planet.

The finding adds to concern about climate change caused by human activities such as burning fossil fuels, a problem that has begun receiving more attention in the Obama administration and is part of the G20 discussions under way in London.

"Due to the recent loss of sea ice, the 2005-2008 autumn central Arctic surface air temperatures were greater than 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit) above" what would be expected, the new study reports.

Nina Fedoroff told the BBC One Planet programme that humans had exceeded the Earth's "limits of sustainability".

Dr Fedoroff has been the science and technology advisor to the US secretary of state since 2007, initially working with Condoleezza Rice.

The Government's appointed Chief Scientist and latter-day Nostradamus, Professor John Beddington, has predicted that within 20 years the world could face "a perfect storm" of food, energy and water shortages that will create a crisis of unprecedented proportions. Yesterday, in a speech to the Sustainable Development UK conference, the Prof Beddington predicted that food and energy demand will grow by 50 per cent and water supplies 30 per cent greater than current ones will be required by 2030. "There's not going to be a complete collapse," he said, "but things will start to get really worrying if we don't tackle these problems" – chief among them that the global population will grow to 8.3 billion by 2030. "This is a very gloomy picture," he concluded.

The bad news is this event could become unstoppable this century if carbon dioxide concentrations keep rising as predicted, a study has found.

An investigation into the stability of the ice sheet has found it has collapsed before when carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have reached about 400 parts per million, a level expected to reached by 2050.

Scientists at a climate change summit in Copenhagen said earlier UN estimates were too low and that sea levels could rise by a metre or more by 2100.

The projections did not include the potential impact of polar melting and ice breaking off, they added.

The implications for millions of people would be "severe", they warned. Ten per cent of the world's population - about 600 million people - live in low-lying areas.

Low-lying areas including Bangladesh, Florida, the Maldives and the Netherlands face catastrophic flooding, while, in Britain, large areas of the Norfolk Broads and the Thames estuary are likely to disappear by 2100. In addition, cities including London, Hull and Portsmouth will need new flood defences.

Storrs Olson, research zoologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and geologist Paul Hearty of the Bald Head Island Conservancy discovered sedimentary and fossil evidence in the walls of a limestone quarry in Bermuda that documents a rise in sea level during an interglacial period of the Middle Pleistocene in excess of 21 meters above its current level. Hearty and colleagues had published preliminary evidence of such a sea-level rise nearly a decade ago, which was met with skepticism among geologists. This marine fossil evidence now provides unequivocal evidence of the timing and extent of this event.

The nature of the sediments and fossil accumulation found by Olson and Hearty was not compatible with the deposits left by a tsunami but rather with the gradual, yet relatively rapid, increase in the volume of the planet’s ocean caused by melting ice sheets.

It's time for some straight talk. No more beating around the bush. I no longer want to evade an issue around whose edges I've been skirting for 12 years. So I'll come right and say it loud and clear: In all probability, we've come to the end of the line.

Unless I'm grievously mistaken, we are about to go extinct. Soon.

In 1997 I warned that we are approaching the onset of a new ice age. I wrote that the record shows that ice ages are preceded by a period of about 20 years, and things get very unpleasant as the end of that period approaches.

Contrary to poor Al Gore's alarmist prediction that the planet is approaching the boiling point, it's getting colder — a lot colder. And it's going to get even colder. Spring and fall will disappear, summers will be short and winters longer and increasingly more frigid.

That, however, is only part of the story. Along with the cooling of the planet will come a series of increasingly violent natural disasters, such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions of a size and fury unmatched in human history. Or a global repeat of the Tungusta event in 1908, which probably was a natural nuclear explosion in Siberia that had the force of 1,000 Hiroshima atom bombs.

And then we will go the way of the dinosaurs.

Earlier research has focused on melting ice adding water to the oceans and on thermal expansion of sea water in a warmer climate.

The study reveals that regions that have been covered by sea ice until now will be exposed to new kinds of severe weather. This may have dire consequences for human activities in the Northern regions.

After the wet and cold centuries of the Little Ice Age (around 1550-1850 A.D.), the world's climate recuperated some warmth, but did not replicate the balmy period known as the Middle Age Warm Period (around 800-1300 A.D.), when the margins of Greenland were green and England had vineyards.

Climate began to cool again after World War II, for about 30 years. This is undisputed. The cooling occurred at a time when emissions of C02 were rising sharply from the reconstruction effort and from unprecedented development. It is important to realize that.

The storms hit Kentucky the hardest, leaving more than half a million customers without power in the Bluegrass State.

Officials at E.ON U.S., which owns Louisville Gas and Electric Co and Kentucky Utilities Co, said it could take up to two weeks to restore service to all 381,000 affected customers.

A new comprehensive scientific synthesis of past Arctic climates demonstrates for the first time the pervasive nature of Arctic climate amplification.

The U.S. Geological Survey led this new assessment, which is a synthesis of published science literature and authored by a team of climate scientists from academia and government. The U.S. Climate Change Science Program commissioned the report, which has contributions from 37 scientists from the United States, Germany, Canada, the United Kingdom and Denmark.

"Our results show a strong correlation between the strength of the earth's magnetic field and the amount of precipitation in the tropics," one of the two Danish geophysicists behind the study, Mads Faurschou Knudsen of the geology department at Aarhus University in western Denmark, told the Videnskab journal.

He and his colleague Peter Riisager, of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS), compared a reconstruction of the prehistoric magnetic field 5,000 years ago based on data drawn from stalagmites and stalactites found in China and Oman.

Based on a "large and compelling body of evidence from within the field of climate science," Pravda reports this week, "many sources of data which provide our knowledge base of long-term climate change" indicate that the current 12,000-year-long warming trend is coming to an end.

Ice cores, ocean sediment cores, the geologic record, and studies of ancient plant and animal populations all demonstrate a regular cyclic pattern of Ice Age glacial maximums which each last about 100,000 years, separated by intervening warm interglacials, each lasting about 12,000 years.