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Secretary of State John Kerry on Friday called for "ambitious, concrete action" to combat climate change after a government agency released new data about global temperatures. "What’s surprising is that anyone is surprised that 2014 was the hottest year on record. The science has been screaming at us for a long, long time," Kerry said Friday in a statement released by the State Department. Kerry said historic temperatures, greenhouse gas emissions and extreme weathers events like torrential rain and droughts "are having devastating economic, security and health impacts across the planet." His comments were in response to a new report...

Guest Post by Bob TisdaleI hadn’t read the NOAA State of the Climate (SOTC) Report for 2014 when I prepared the post Does the Uptick in Global Surface Temperatures in 2014 Help the Growing Difference between Climate Models and Reality?  (WattsUpWithThat cross post is here.) I simply presented data and climate model outputs in that post.The following are a few observations about the annual NOAA report. NOAA biased their report by omitting key discussions.  First an introduction.THE 2014 GLOBAL HIGHLIGHTS OF THE NOAA SOTC REPORTWith respect to surface temperatures, the Global Highlights of the NOAA State of the Climate report...

The Art of Lying by Omission Back in the old days, when scientists had standards, they would never get excited over one hot year and certainly not over one meaningless hundredth of a degree.The NOAA and NASA spinmeisters are parsing their press releases carefully, using vagueness to speak in half-truth-tongues. They utter no outright lie, yet misinform the crowd with lies by omission.NOAA and NASA don’t say their models still don’t work, that the world was supposed to be a lot warmer and the “pause” continues. Nor do they admit that it has been warmer before many times in...

WASHINGTON (AP) — For the third time in a decade, the globe sizzled to the hottest year on record, federal scientists announced Friday. Both the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA calculated that in 2014 the world had its hottest year in 135 years of record-keeping. Earlier, the Japanese weather agency and an independent group out of University of California Berkeley also measured 2014 as the hottest on record.

ROME (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Human activity has pushed the planet across four of nine environmental boundaries, sending the world towards a "danger zone", according to a study published on Thursday in the journal Science. Climate change, biodiversity loss, changes in land use, and altered biogeochemical cycles due in part to fertilizer use have fundamentally changed how the planet functions, the study said. These changes destabilize complex interactions between people, oceans, land and the atmosphere, said the paper "Planetary Boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet" by 18 leading international researchers.

In an article provide from the archives of the Chicago Tribune we see a cautionary tale with  happy ending. The article written by Michael Smith in January of 1969 quotes Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg, then chairman of the Atomic Energy commission: “For 21st century Chicago,” Smith wrote in summary of Seaborg in 1969, “the price could be the creation of a city in which the sun never shines because it cannot penetrate the tons of airborne pollutants and a city where rainfall strikes terror because it drenches everything with destructive and deadly acids.”Growing up in Chicago the sun often never...

The world’s oceans are now rising far faster than they did in the past, a new study says. The study found that for much of the 20th century — until about 1990 — sea level was about 30 percent less than earlier research had figured. But that’s not good news, scientists say, because about 25 years ago the seas started rising faster and the acceleration in 1990 turns out to be more dramatic than previously calculated.

In President Obama’s latest move using executive authority to tackle climate change, administration officials will announce plans this week to impose new regulations on the oil and gas industry’s emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, according to a person familiar with Mr. Obama’s plans. The administration’s goal is to cut methane emissions from oil and gas production by up to 45 percent by 2025 from the levels recorded in 2012. The Environmental Protection Agency will issue the proposed regulations this summer, and final regulations by 2016, according to the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the...

Taking direct aim at the oil-and-gas industry, President Obama on Wednesday put forth long-awaited regulations on methane emissions, setting an ambitious goal of reducing those emissions by 45 percent over the next decade. The move comes just days before the State of the Union address and underscores that, in the final two years of presidency, Mr. Obama is looking to cement his legacy on climate-change and environmental issues...

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Tuesday he will allow the Senate to vote on an amendment asking if they agree that climate change is impacting the planet. At his weekly press briefing, McConnell said "nobody is blocking any amendments" to legislation that would approve construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. The GOP leader had promised to allow an open amendment process on the Keystone bill. But a measure proposed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) had raised questions about whether he would stick to that commitment. The Sanders measure asks whether lawmakers agree with the overwhelming consensus of scientists...

Secretary of State John Kerry is currently in India as advance guard for President Obama’s visit later this month. The president is going there to try and get some commitment from India (or the illusion of a commitment) to reduce its emissions of dreaded greenhouse gases. Until now, India, along with China, has resisted calls for major reductions, effectively blocking any global treaty limiting fossil fuel use. The president is very keen on changing this before this December’s United Nations confab in Paris, where such a treaty is supposed to be inked. Kerry’s mission is to get India ready for the president....

This is a video of Tim Ball, PhD speaking at the Skagit Education Outreach in Mount Vernon, Wa. on May 30th, 2014. It was apparently just uploaded to YouTube where I happened upon it. It's a two hour presentation, but well worth listening to.

'Global Climate Change Is Already Violently Affecting Communities … Around the World'.

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Following the ratification of Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) as chair of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committtee last week, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was named chair of the Subcommittee on Space, Science and Competitiveness, where he will oversee NASA and science programs. Appointed Jan. 8, Cruz is expected to be confirmed to the new role by the end of the month as one of many changes to the new Republican-controlled Congress. But the Republican senator's words and actions during his time in office have painted him to be a far cry from an advocate for the sciences, leaving many...

Washington, DC – Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell today issued a Secretarial Order calling for a comprehensive science-based strategy to address the more frequent and intense wildfires that are damaging vital sagebrush landscapes and productive rangelands, particularly in the Great Basin region of Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Oregon and California. The strategy will begin to be implemented during the 2015 fire season. Goals include reducing the size, severity and cost of rangeland fires, addressing the spread of cheatgrass and other invasive species, and positioning wildland fire management resources for more effective rangeland fire response. “Targeted action is urgently needed to...

At the end of last year, with most of his colleagues stuck in Washington for an important Senate session on a Saturday, Sen. James M. Inhofe was in Tulsa getting spurs fastened onto a pair of boots. “They’re ostrich,” said Inhofe (R-Okla.), the country’s most prominent climate-change denier, referring to his footwear. “Probably some endangered species; I have a reputation to maintain.” Inhofe could have been wearing Birkenstocks and it wouldn’t have put a dent in his notoriety. The senator cemented his status as public enemy No. 1 for environmentalists long ago, topping it off with his 2012 book on...

The senator is on-record denying climate change and has regularly pushed for government cutbacks.As expected, after a major GOP win in the last Congressional election, there's been a shuffling in the ranks of committees, including those that oversee science in government. Next up to chair the Senate subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness, and thus oversee NASA in the 114th Congress: Texas Senator Ted Cruz. Cruz, a republican, has said it is "critical that the United States ensure its continued leadership in space," but his stances on established science will no doubt be concerning: he's gone on record, for example,...

Guest Post by Willis EschenbachFollowing up on my previous investigations into the oceanic pH dataset, I’ve taken a deeper look at what the 2.5 million pH data points from the oceanographic data can tell us. Let me start with an overview of oceanic pH (the measure of alkalinity/acidity, with neutral being a pH of 7.0). Many people think that the ocean has only one pH  everywhere. Other people think that the oceanic pH is different in different places, but is constant over time. Neither view is correct.First, here is a view of a transect of the north Pacific ocean...

Co-authored James Doogue and JoNovaEmpirical data withheld by key scientists shows that since 1910 ocean pH levels have not decreased in our oceans as carbon dioxide levels increased. Overall the trend is messy but more up than down, becoming less acidic. So much for those terrifying oceans of acid that were coming our way.What happened to those graphs? Scientists have had pH meters and measurements of the oceans for one hundred years. But experts decided that computer simulations in 2014 were better at measuring the pH in 1910 than the pH meters were. The red line (below) is the models...

Billionaire Tom Steyer Mulls Run For Sen. Boxer's Seat July 2014 Tom Steyer, former hedge fund titan, has been huddling with advisors, polling voters, buying web addresses and meeting with political and labor leaders, sources say. By SEEMA MEHTA AND MICHAEL FINNEGAN Tom Steyer, a former hedge fund manager and a major political donor, considers a run for Sen. Boxer's seat. Billionaire environmental activist Tom Steyer is aggressively exploring a run for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Barbara Boxer and is expected to make a decision within days, according to multiple sources close to Steyer. The former hedge...