The LATimes has actually taken the lead over the other major newspapers of the nation on what is happening to planet earth. They did a great series on particulates in the air a few years ago correlating these pollutants to the huge rise in asthma in children.
Now they're doing a series from a very interesting direction on our planets atmosphere that is fascinating reading, even if science/earth's warming is not your thing.
New Wyoming supercomputer expected to boost atmospheric science
The National Center for Atmospheric Research's supercomputer has been dubbed Yellowstone, after the nearby national park, but it could have been named Nerdvana. The machine will have 100 racks of servers and 72,000 core processors, so many parts that they must be delivered in the back of a 747. Yellowstone will be capable of performing 1.5 quadrillion calculations — a quadrillion is a 1 followed by 15 zeros — every second.
That's nearly a quarter of a million calculations, each second, for every person on Earth. In a little more than an hour, Yellowstone can do as many calculations as there are grains of sand on every beach in the world.
The study of climate and weather patterns has always been hamstrung by volatility — by elements of chaos in the seas and the air. That challenge is most famously summed up by the "butterfly effect," the idea that the flapping of a butterfly's wings on the coast of Africa can determine whether a hurricane will strike New Orleans.