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Gen. Wesley Clark placed part of the blame for the Syrian Civil War on blamed climate change in a discussion on Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time.” Clark said “It’s what was behind a lot of the violence in Syria, it’s happening in East Africa, it’s happening in West Africa. Right now.”

The equation seems fairly simple: The more the world's population rises, the greater the strain on dwindling resources and the greater the impact on the environment. The solution? Well, that's a little trickier to talk about. Public-health discussions will regularly include mentions of voluntary family planning as a way to reduce unwanted pregnancies and births. But, said Jason Bremner of the Population Reference Bureau, those policies can also pay dividends for the environment. "And yet the climate-change benefits of family planning have been largely absent from any climate-change or family-planning policy discussions," he said. A 2010 study published in the...

The Environmental Protection Agency released a grim report Friday that said it must start planning for the worst possible effects of climate change, and predicted a future world filled with rising sea levels, raging wildfires and more severe storms. All of these factors will combine to create droughts, expose humans to dangerous chemicals and create other conditions that will put the human race at risk.

The Obama administration published a small library's worth of climate change documents on Friday, outlining 38 federal agencies' vulnerabilities to global warming and how they will address them -- as well as a separate and even larger set of new government-wide plans to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions and achieve new targets for sustainability. In many cases, the vulnerabilities revealed are stark. The Department of Agriculture, for instance, sees "the potential for up to 100 percent increase in the number of acres burned annually by 2050" by wildfires, according to its new adaptation report. The agency notes that fire...

As worsening drought and extreme weather devastate crops, you may begin seeing global warming when you open your fridge. According to David Lobell,deputy director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford University, “The general story is that agriculture is sensitive. It’s not the end of the world; but it will be a big enough deal to be worth our concern.” Lobell has already noticed the effect of climate change on some crops. For example, he says, yield data from corn and wheat production suggests that these two staples are already being negatively affected by the changing...

Billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer is turning to actor Woody Harrelson and director Darren Aronofsky in a new ad urging voters to “take the fight against climate change to the ballot box.” The 30-second ad buy, narrated by Harrelson, and directed by Aronofsky, declares the climate fight is one people “will win,” but voting on Election Day is key. “They told us the world was flat and insisted it was the center of the universe,” Harrelson states in the ad as images of the earth in black and white flicker on the screen. “[They] said that cigarettes were harmless.” “Now they...

EXPOSED: How a shadowy network funded by foreign millions is making our household energy bills soar - for a low-carbon Britain Shadowy pro-green lobbyists working at every level of the Establishment Organisations are channelling tens of millions of pounds into green policies Elite lobby group linked to Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the WWF Current energy policies shaped by the Green Blob will cost up to £400billion If continued, there will be further eye-watering energy bill rises for Britons The Mail on Sunday today exposes how a ‘Green Blob’ financed by a shadowy group of hugely wealthy foreign donors...

Final winter forecast.

The recent report published by the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate, an organization aimed at helping the world's societies to combat the effects of climate change, suggests that the costs of combating climate change are considerably lower than widespread opinion has suggested. The study tells us that between 2015 and 2030, nations are expected to invest roughly $90 trillion in urban, land-use and energy infrastructure. The report suggests that implementing the fixes necessary to transition to entirely sustainable sources of energy would amount to 4 trillion. So, this amounts to 5% increase of the total amount that is...

A UN proposal that would see small island states offered debt relief to pay for climate change contains a “fundamentally unjust” blind spot, according to development groups. But advocates see the idea as an innovative way to increase the money available for climate change adaptation in the most vulnerable states. The UN Development Programme (UNDP) is working on an initiative that would see rich countries write off debt owed to them by Small Island Developing States (Sids) in exchange for the money being spent on climate change adaptation. Due to their disproportionate contribution to climate change, industrialised countries agreed to...

Splattergate II: Green Graphic Novel Celebrates Eco-Terrorism Shopping Mall Killing Spree  When is it acceptable for a terrorist to go berserk in a shopping mall and machine gun innocent victims to death? When it's all being done for the noble cause of environmentalism, of course! Such is the take-home message of an award-winning graphic novel which has been praised by a top scientist at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as "a marvellous way to convey the knowledge accumulated by our scientific community." It has also been recommended by a curriculum developer at the US National Council of Teachers...

Europe’s leaders are about to consign the Earth to the risk of dangerous climate change, a UN expert says. Prof Jim Skea, a vice-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says the EU’s plan to cut CO2 emissions 40% by 2030 is too weak. He says it will commit future governments to “extraordinary and unprecedented” emissions cuts. The Commission rejected the claim, saying the 40% target puts Europe on track for long-term climate goals. Prof Skea believes governments are setting targets by what appears to be politically achievable rather than what is necessary to transform the way we make...

September brought more record heat globally, and meteorologists say Earth is now on pace to tie for the hottest year ever recorded. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Monday that last month the globe averaged 60.3 degrees Fahrenheit. That was the hottest September in 135 years of record keeping. It was the fourth monthly record set this year, along with May, June and August.

Research ecologist Nathan Stephenson crawled around magnificent Giant Forest, checking young giant sequoias for damage from California’s three-year drought. Though the older sequoias have survived past climate warmups, no one knows how these natural treasures will hold up this time. Climate warming is moving faster than it has in the past, scientists say. Some researchers worry that the Sierra will lose some trees that were alive before the time of Christ. They acknowledge it’s possible the giant sequoia will not survive as a species.

HEAR that rain on the roof last week? That’s nature telling us our politicians have been idiots. I’m talking about the politicians who let themselves be fooled into thinking it never would rain like this again. I’m talking about politicians who listened to the likes of Tim Flannery, the 2007 Australian of the Year and then head of the Climate Commission. From 2005 to 2008, Flannery, the global warming guru, made a string of outlandish claims like these: “So even the rain that falls isn’t actually going to fill our dams and our river systems ... “In Adelaide, Sydney and...

Hurricanes and historical records, this year's El Nino. Factors Weatherbell is looking at on their way to predicting this year's winter.

Targets for renewables are unattainable, futile – and will cost us trillions of pounds. Some time in this century, we reached a state of clever-silly unanimity over green policies, especially carbon emission controls and renewables targets. All parties (except five brave Tories voting against) voted for the second reading of the Climate Change Act in 2008. So, for some years, we humoured the climate-change lobby, and nodded our heads gravely when experts told us we must help save the planet. But most of us behaved like churchgoers listening to boring sermons. We accepted what we were told, on the unspoken...

A new video by the Environmental Policy Alliance mocks Hollywood celebrity Leonardo DiCaprio for being "just another celebrity hypocrite" when it comes to the topic of climate change:

Britain will struggle to “keep the lights on” unless the Government changes its green energy policies, the former environment secretary will warn this week. Owen Paterson will say that the Government’s plan to slash carbon emissions and rely more heavily on wind farms and other renewable energy sources is fatally flawed. He will argue that the 2008 Climate Change Act, which ties Britain into stringent targets to reduce the use of fossil fuels, should be suspended until other countries agree to take similar measures. If they refuse, the legislation should be scrapped altogether, he will say. The speech will be...

Joe's Saturday rant on global warming, Michael Mann, and near weather.