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Scientists to Trump: Human-caused climate change is real — and don’t mess with the hard-won Paris Agreement. That’s the message of a new letter co-drafted by a prominent Bay Area climate scientist and signed by 375 members of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, including famed physicist Stephen Hawking, biologist E.O. Wilson and 30 Nobel Prize winners.

If you vote for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, you’re voting in favor of “climate catastrophe,” according to liberal Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson. “Anyone who takes climate change seriously had better do everything possible to keep Donald Trump out of the White House,” Robinson wrote in a recent op-ed on why Trump would be bad for the fight against global warming. “Global warming is affecting weather patterns worldwide,” Robinson wrote.

SACRAMENTO (AP) — Gov. Jerry Brown has signed legislation that regulates emissions from dairy cows and landfills for the first time as California broadens its efforts to fight climate change beyond carbon-based greenhouse gases. Brown’s move Monday targets a category of gases known as short-lived climate pollutants, which have an outsize effect on global warming despite their relatively short life in the atmosphere.

Secretary of State John Kerry says, climate change skeptics believe that with “the melting of the ice and the rise of sea level, all that extra water is just going to spill over the sides of a flat Earth.” Kerry made the comments Wednesday at the Global Fishing Watch reception in Washington, D.C. “We now have the highest rate of increase of acidity in the ocean in 50 million years,” Kerry said. “And believe it or not, scientists have the ability to measure that. And that acidity changes the capacity of particularly crustaceans to be able to grow.” …

In a year of record-setting heat on a blistered globe, with fast-warming oceans, fast-melting ice caps, and fast-rising sea levels, ratification of the December 2015 Paris climate summit agreement—already endorsed by most nations—should be a complete no-brainer. That it isn't tells you a great deal about our world. Global geopolitics and the possible rightward lurch of many countries (including a potential deal-breaking election in the United States that could put a climate denier in the White House) spell bad news for the fate of the Earth. It's worth exploring how this might come to be. Such nationalistic exceptionalism could become...

Workers will lose their jobs as Europe shifts to a green economy, European Commission Vice-President Maroš Šefčovič has admitted, amid warnings the world faces political and economic turmoil not witnessed since the 1930s. Šefčovič made an impassioned plea for national governments to make sure that no one was thrown on the scrapheap of the green revolution. But, he added, “climate change is here and it poses an imminent danger.” “We should not create obstacles by not taking good care of people who may be intimidated by this transformation,” he said before calling for social programs such as retraining those made...

....the Earth’s coasts actually gained land over the past 30 years, according to another study published August 25 in Nature Climate Change. Researchers led by Gennadii Donchyts from the Deltares Research Institute in the Netherlands found that the Earth’s surface gained a total of 58,000 square kilometers (22,393 square miles) of land over the past 30 years, including 33,700 sq. km. (13,000 sq. mi.) in coastal areas. “We expected that the coast would start to retreat due to sea level rise, but the most surprising thing is that the coasts are growing all over the world,” study co-author Fedor Baart...

Nicolas Sarkozy, who is fighting to regain the presidency that he lost to François Hollande in 2012, has finally come out of the closet as a climate skeptic. Speaking in front of business leaders, Sarkozy, a candidate for Les Republicains party primary in November, told them that man alone was not to blame for climate change. “Climate has been changing for four billion years,” the former president said according to AFP. “Sahara has become a desert; it isn’t because of industry. You need to be as arrogant as men are to believe we changed the climate.” …

Everyone knows that before the global warming scare began in the 1980s, scientists were much more worried about global cooling and the coming ice age. At least everybody did till a cabal of lying climate alarmists – one then a senior administrator at NOAA, now a president at the World Meteorological Association – hijacked Wikipedia, published a lying paper, and rewrote history by painting the 1970s Global Cooling Scare as an urban myth.

The planet is doomed unless humans achieve zero net “carbon” emissions within 40 years—and maybe even if we do.That’s the word from eleven co-authors, led by Johan Rockstöm of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, of a pseudo-scientific screed published August 24 in Earth’s Future, an open-access online journal of the American Geophysical Union.Here’s the abstract: The scale of the decarbonisation challenge to meet the Paris Agreement is underplayed in the public arena. It will require precipitous emission reductions and a new carbon sink on the scale of the ocean sink within 40 years. Even then, the world is extremely likely to...

NPR correspondent Jennifer Ludden profiled some of my work in procreative ethics with an article entitled, “Should we be having kids in the age of climate change?,” which summarized my published views that we ought to consider adopting a “small family ethic” and even pursuing fertility reduction efforts in response to the threat from climate change. ... Perhaps many of us in rich countries (the “us” who might be reading this) will be largely protected from these early harms; but that doesn’t make them less real to the vulnerable citizens of, say, Bangladesh, Kiribati or the Maldives. In fact, it...

The New York Times’ multi-part series profiling President Barack Obama’s legacy on global warming reveals the president is a fan of a book on how “climate change and overpopulation” could cause modern civilization to collapse. Obama was apparently a fan of Jared Diamond’s 2005 book “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,” which “explored the environmental changes that wiped out ancient societies like Easter Island and discussed how modern equivalents like climate change and overpopulation could yield the same destruction,” according to NYT. An Obama aide told NYT he “recalled” the president mentioning Diamond’s book. Diamond is also the...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Man-made climate change about doubled the chances for the type of heavy downpours that caused devastating Louisiana floods last month, a new federal study finds. Using two different sets of measurements and computer model runs simulating thousands of years, scientists found a clear sign of global warming in the rain that triggered the flooding that killed at least 13 people, damaged 150,000 homes and cost at least $8.7 billion. More than 26 inches of rain fell in one week, with nearly a foot in just one day, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

California will become a petri dish for international efforts to slow global warming under legislation signed by Gov. Jerry Brown on Thursday, forcing one of the world’s largest economies to squeeze into a dramatically smaller carbon footprint. “What we’re doing here is farsighted, as well as far-reaching,” Brown said at a signing ceremony at Vista Hermosa Natural Park in downtown Los Angeles. “California is doing something that no other state has done.” The legislation, SB 32, requires the state to slash greenhouse gas emissions to 40% below 1990 levels by 2030, a much more ambitious target than the previous goal...

A new study from professors at Oklahoma State University has found that Republicans and Democrats have never been so far apart on climate issues. "What was once a modest tendency for Congressional Republicans to be less pro-environmental than their Democratic counterparts has become a chasm—with Republicans taking near-unanimous anti-environmental stances on relevant legislation in recent years, especially 2015," the study said. This distance between the parties was further exacerbated by the rise of the Koch-funded Tea Party, which took the hard line of fully dismissing the climate change threat, often making climate change a lightning rod for voters who were...

Hillary Clinton said climate change was to blame for Hurricane Hermine during a campaign rally Tuesday in Tampa, Florida, warning more storms would come. “Another threat to our country is climate change,” she said. “2015 was the hottest year on record, and the science is clear. It’s real. It’s wreaking havoc on communities across America. Last week’s hurricane was another reminder of the devastation that extreme weather can cause, and I send my thoughts and prayers to everyone affected by Hermine.”

Storm surges pushed by Hermine, the once and future hurricane that on Sunday was moving up the US eastern seaboard, could be even more damaging because sea levels have risen by a foot due to global warming, climate scientists say.Michael Mann of the Pennsylvania State University noted that this century’s one-foot sea-level rise in New York City meant 25 more square miles flooded during Hurricane Sandy in 2012, causing billions more in damage. “We are already experiencing more and more flooding due to climate change in every storm,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a geosciences professor at Princeton University. “And it’s only...

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Sunday that climate change scepticism is over, the day after the United States joined China to ratify the Paris agreement to curb climate-warming emissions. Climate change skeptics dispute the widely held understanding that excessive levels of emissions in the atmosphere cause global warming and harm the environment, and have become increasingly side-lined at international summits. "The debate over climate phenomenon is over scientifically and environmentally," said Ban

Obama and China’s President Xi Jinping on Saturday sealed their nations’ participation in last year’s Paris climate change agreement. At a ceremony on the sidelines of a global economic summit, Mr. Obama and Xi, representing the world’s two biggest carbon emitters, delivered a series of documents to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. The papers certified the U.S. and China have taken the necessary steps to join the Paris accord that set nation-by-nation targets for cutting carbon emissions. The formal U.S.-Chinese announcement means the accord could enter force by the end of the year, a faster than anticipated timeline. The Paris deal...

First there was Brexit, now there’s Clexit – or “Climate Exit”. The Clexit Coalition represents a growing movement of individuals no longer buying that the “science” behind climate change is settled. They argue that all harmful, costly and unscientific climate treaties should be torn up and are on a mission to have their voices heard and their opinions represented fairly in the media. Viv Forbes, Founding Secretary of “Clexit” (Climate Exit), writes: