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Virginia’s highest court has denied a conservative group’s effort to force the University of Virginia to turn over emails from a controversial climate scientist who worked at the school. The Virginia Supreme Court on Thursday held that the public university wasn’t obligated under the state’s freedom of information law to release thousands of emails that Penn State researcher Michael Mann wrote while he was a UVA professor several years ago. Mr. Mann in 2009 came under scrutiny among global warming skeptics after hackers leaked thousands of email exchanges between the professor and other researchers that suggested that the scientists sought...

The cult centered on “global warming” alarmism is getting hot under the collar. People seem to have stopped paying attention, and polls show “climate change” barely registers on a list of voters' concerns. This can only mean, as losing politicians like to say, that their message isn’t getting through. What to do? Why, shout louder, of course. A recent story in the New York Times sought to help alarmists raise the decibel level: “The countries of the world have dragged their feet so long on global warming that the situation is now critical, experts appointed by the United Nations reported...

THE WORLD now has a rough deadline for action on climate change. Nations need to take aggressive action in the next 15 years to cut carbon emissions, in order to forestall the worst effects of global warming, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Expect a certain part of our political class to insist that man-made climate change is not consensus science, and that until it is, nothing should be done. The problem there is obvious: By the time all the skeptics are persuaded, it will be too late for an effective response. In that regard, climate change poses a...

Climate change’s latest casualty appears to be fish — or more specifically, fish brains — as researchers say the carbon dioxide that’s being absorbed into the ocean is causing the scaly creatures to lose their survival instincts. In other words, the fish are losing their minds, The Daily Mail reported. The acid from atmospheric carbon dioxide seeps into sea waters, dissolves and ultimately lowers the pH balance, researchers said. The acidic waters then hamper the fishes’ sensory systems, so they’re not able to distinguish between smells any longer, the scientists went on.

For all the noise about the State Department's final environmental review of the Keystone XL Pipeline being a "blow" to pipeline opponents, the report contains more than enough information for Secretary of State John Kerry -- a respected environmental champion -- to conclude that the pipeline is not in the national interest. Although you have to dig a bit, the report recognizes the dangers associated with the tar sands fuel that the pipeline would transport. Kerry's obligation is to determine what is in the national interest. For all its flaws, the report acknowledges that the tar sands that would get...

--snip-- BANGKOK (AP) - A survey released Tuesday -- the first comprehensive one of its kind - says that only 10 killers of 908 environmental activists slain around the world over the past decade have been convicted. The report by the London-based Global Witness, a group that seeks to shed light on the links between environmental exploitation and human rights abuses, says murders of those protecting land rights and the environment have soared dramatically.

International efforts to combat global warming are so broken that it's come to this: hoovering massive amounts of carbon dioxide out of the sky. A body of scientists convened under the auspices of the United Nations is giving more weight to the idea that vacuuming vast stores of CO2 from the skies and burying it in the ground may be necessary to limit the temperature rise to the internationally agreed safe level of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-industrial levels. The plan's not quite like a giant thermostat for the whole globe, but the metaphor's not completely off either.

Correction April 12, 2014 An earlier version of this story said that the methane emissions associated with livestock come from their farts. In fact, most of those methane emissions come from belches. Sorry to ruin your appetite, but it's time to talk about cow belches. Humans the world over are eating meat and drinking milk — some of us a little less, some of us a lot more, than years past. Farmers are bringing more and more cows into the world to meet demand, and with them escapes more methane into the atmosphere. In 2011, methane from livestock accounted for...

BERLIN — It’s Plan B in the fight against climate change: cooling the planet by sucking heat-trapping CO2 from the air or reflecting sunlight back into space. Called geoengineering, it’s considered mad science by opponents. Supporters say it would be foolish to ignore it, since plan A — slashing carbon emissions from fossil fuels — is moving so slowly. The U.N.’s expert panel on climate change is under pressure from both sides this week as it considers whether geoengineering should be part of the tool-kit that governments use to keep global warming in check.

The Obama administration released a comprehensive strategy document Wednesday aimed at reducing wildfires, which it says are being exacerbated by climate change. The strategy recommends preventive measures like controlled burns, municipal and state zoning to reduce the effects of sprawl and incorporating watersheds into local management plans. “As climate change spurs extended droughts and longer fire seasons, this collaborative wildfire blueprint will help us restore forests and rangelands to make communities less vulnerable to catastrophic fire,” said Jack Boots, acting chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality.

Trust in technology: That seems to be the underlying message of a coming report from the world's top panel on climate change. Scheduled for release on Sunday, the new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report will point to many possible ways - from burying greenhouse gases to going nuclear to encouraging biofuel production—to save humanity from the ravages of climate change. "I think we will see that there are a wide number of paths we can take to get to the mountaintop we want to reach," says economist James Edmonds. "We just have to pick what mountaintop we all want,...

Accuracy varies significantly across major cable news outlets. All of them can take steps to improve their coverage of climate science. To gauge how accurately these networks inform their audiences about climate change, UCS analyzed the networks' climate science coverage in 2013 and found that each network treated climate science very differently. Fox News was the least accurate; 72 percent of its 2013 climate science-related segments contained misleading statements. CNN was in the middle, with about a third of segments featuring misleading statements. MSNBC was the most accurate, with only eight percent of segments containing misleading statements * Mutual acceptance...

Will a warming world eventually kill off roe deer in France? That question is being raised in light of new research indicating that the animals are having a hard time adapting to climate change. In a study published Tuesday in the open-access journal PLOS Biology, researchers tracked the births and subsequent survival of roe deer fawns in France's Champagne region. They noted that spring vegetation on which the adult deer depend for food was starting to flourish two weeks earlier that it did nearly three decades ago, due to gradual warming. But although spring was arriving earlier, the animals' birth...

Climate change is having a big impact on both the earth's natural systems and how people live, according to the most comprehensive assessment of the threat of a warming planet done so far. The second part in a four-part report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that the problem will become increasingly difficult to manage, with possible threats to everything from the food supply to coral reefs and low-lying coastal areas. "The striking feature of observed impacts is that they are occurring from the tropics to the poles, from small islands to large continents, and from the...

Tackling the effects of climate change could cost governments around the world more than $100 billion a year, a United Nations panel of experts said Monday. A report by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says that a temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius will wipe out up to 2% of the world's income by 2050. "If we get up to 4 degrees temperature rise, which most scientists now expect would happen if we carry on emitting greenhouse gasses as we do, then the cost could be much more severe," Chris Hope, a climate change researcher at Cambridge University...

Scientists and officials meeting in Japan have published the most comprehensive assessment to date of the impacts of climate change on the world. Members of the UN's climate panel say that their report provides overwhelming evidence of the scale of these effects. Natural systems are bearing the brunt right now but the scientists fear a growing impact on humans. Our health, homes, food and safety are all likely to be threatened by rising temperatures, the summary says. Speaking to journalists at a news conference in Yokohama to launch the report, Michel Jarraud, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization, said that,...

YOKOHAMA, Japan — Climate change is already having sweeping effects on every continent and throughout the world’s oceans, scientists reported Monday, and they warned that the problem is likely to grow substantially worse unless greenhouse emissions are brought under control. The report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group that periodically summarizes climate science, concluded that ice caps are melting, sea ice in the Arctic is collapsing, water supplies are coming under stress, heat waves and heavy rains are intensifying, coral reefs are dying, and fish and many other creatures are migrating toward the poles or...

On Monday morning in Japan, the world's leading body of climate scientists will release a major report on the impacts of climate change, with the goal of spurring world leaders to act more decisively to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. "Observed impacts of climate change are widespread and consequential," the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) write in a draft version of the new report. The new report is expected to show that "today's choices are going to significantly affect the risk that climate change will pose for the rest of the century," says Kelly LeWanker, a scientist...

The City of Little Rock is encouraging residents and businesses to join millions world-wide to raise awareness about climate change by switching off non-essential lighting for Earth Hour – Saturday March 29, 2014 at 8:30 p.m. local time. Little Rock is one of more than 7,000 cities and towns around the world expected to take part in the world's largest voluntary environmental action. "As good stewards of the environment, we encourage Little Rock residents, businesses and organizations to participate in Earth Hour this Saturday by turning off all non-essential lights," said Little Rock Mayor Mark Stodola. "The City has made...

Heavy rains from the Amazon to Australia have curbed sea level rise so far this century by shifting water from the oceans to land, according to a study that rejects theories that the slowdown is tied to a pause in global warming. Sea level rise has been one of the clearest signs of climate change - water expands as it warms and parts of Greenland and Antarctica are thawing, along with glaciers from the Himalayas to the Alps. But in a puzzle to climate scientists, the rate slowed to 2.4 millimeters (0.09 inch) a year from 2003 to 2011 from...