Damage in the Breezy Point neighborhood of Queens in the wake of Sandy. (Getty Images ) You can do a lot with $9.7 trillion: buy all the real estate in Manhattan 12 times over, purchase 22 carbon copies of Apple, or an absurd quantity of apples. It’s also the amount of money that tropical cyclones could cost the global economy over the next century, especially if climate projections of fewer but more intense cyclones are accurate. In comparison to those...

A map of the world showing the difference between September 2014 temperatures and the 1951-1980 averages. The darker the color, the greater the difference between last month's temperatures and the long-term average. (NASA/GISS) Last month was the warmest September in historical temperature records that date back more than 130 years, NASA said Sunday in its monthly global temperature report. The global average temperature for September 2014 was 0.77°C (1.38°F) above the 1951-1980 historical average for the month, the agency reported...

The U.S. Department of Defense released a "Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap" on Monday, detailing plans to combat both "immediate" and future national security risks due to climate change. U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel (R) stressed the urgent nature of those risks in the report's foreword, saying that a lack of scientific consensus on future climate change projections "cannot be an excuse for delaying action" by the Department of Defense in mitigating climate change related impacts that the military is...

Four faults directly underneath California's densely populated San Francisco Bay Area show signs of being highly stressed and could rupture in a major earthquake at any time, according to a study published earlier this week. Led by scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey and published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, the study says four faults -- the Calaveras, Green Valley, Hayward and Rodgers Creek Faults -- have built up enough seismic strain to unleash a quake...

Muir Glacier and Inlet (1895) In the photo above, the west shoreline of Muir Inlet in Alaska's Glacier Bay National Park & Preserve is shown as it appeared in 1895. Notice the lack of vegetation on the slopes of the mountains, and the glacier that stands more than 300 feet high. See the glacier as it looked in 2005 on the next page. (USGS/Bruce Molnia) For the better part of the last 6,000 years sea levels across the Earth rose...

Orange sludge leaking from the Trench Camp Mine near Patagonia, Ariz. ((AP Photo/Arizona Republic, Gooch Goodwin)) When record breaking rain from former Hurricane Norbert and Hurricane Odile moved into the Southwest last month, residents of Patagonia, Arizona, might have expected local waterways to flood, but they definitely didn't expect them to turn orange. But that's exactly what happened just outside the sleepy Santa Cruz County town after two local abandoned mines flooded and sent a surge of toxic substances into...

For the last 11,000-years-plus the world has been in the same geological time period, but if a growing contingent of scientists and other experts has their way, mankind could usher in an entirely new epoch soon, the foundation of which is based entirely off of mankind's impact on the planet. The newly proposed epoch, known as the Anthropocene, was unofficially used by scientists starting around 2000 to describe, as the New York Times' Andrew Revkin calls it, "a geological age...

In an unsettling testament to the severity of Beijing’s pollution problem, thousands of runners hit the streets for the city’s annual marathon on Sunday decked out in gas masks. Organizers of the 34th Beijing International Marathon warned runners in advance to expect a slight to moderate smog risk, but upgraded the warning to ‘hazardous’ early Sunday, according to the BBC. Channel News Asia reports that air pollution on race day was 16 times the recommended level. (MORE: China's Smog Worsens)...

The Green Bridge passes over full water levels at a section of Lake Oroville near the Bidwell Marina on July 20, 2011, in Oroville, California. (Paul Hames/California Department of Water Resources/Getty Images) Impacts from California's worsening drought continue to add up, and this time, a renewable energy source is taking a hit. A report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) details how California's hydropower generation has been decimated by the drought, dropping to unprecedented levels. The numbers are telling:...

A prototype of the Air HES cloud moisture collection device. (AIR HES) If you told Andrew Kazantsev that he really had his head in the clouds, he’d likely take it as a compliment. The Russian scientist has big plans to save the world by using just that–cloud power. Kazantsev and his St. Petersburg-based team havecreated an early prototype of a device that is able to extract water from clouds high above in theatmosphere. Dubbed the Air Hydro Electric Station, or...

Just two months after São Paulo's state-run water utility Sabesp refused to implement water rationing amidst the area's worst drought in eight decades, at least one government official is warning of "dramatic water shortages" and "collapse" for the residents of South America's most populous metro area. “If the drought continues, residents will face more dramatic water shortages in the short term,” said Vicente Andreu, president of Brazil’s National Water Agency. “If it doesn’t rain, we run the risk that the...

(ThinkStock) This spring, the Pew Research Center talked with people in 44 countries around the world to find out what they see as the world's biggest danger. After surveying more than 48,000 people, the group found that people gave very different answers depending on where they live. Pew's research, published on Oct. 16, showed that what Americans see as the biggest threat to the world -- the gap between rich and poor, according to a plurality (27 percent) of U.S....

U.S. power plants released more greenhouse gases in 2013 than 2012 despite recent efforts by the Obama administration to drastically cut such pollution by 2030, a new report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) shows, and the brutal winter of 2013 shoulders a large part of the blame. The EIA reports that from 2012 to 2013 carbon dioxide emissions from energy-related sources rose by 2.5 percent, the fourth largest increase in such emissions since 1990. This marks the first...