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WASHINGTON — The Pentagon on Monday released a report asserting decisively that climate change poses an immediate threat to national security, with increased risks from terrorism, infectious disease, global poverty and food shortages. It also predicted rising demand for military disaster responses as extreme weather creates more global humanitarian crises. The report lays out a road map to show how the military will adapt to rising sea levels, more violent storms and widespread droughts. The Defense Department will begin by integrating plans for climate change risks across all of its operations, from war games and strategic military planning situations to...

Fewer than half of American states are working to protect themselves from climate change, despite more detailed warnings from scientists that communities are already being damaged, according to a new online clearinghouse of states’ efforts compiled by the Georgetown Climate Center. Fourteen states have plans to prepare for the effects of climate change. California, New York and Maryland are among those that have made the greatest progress toward the dozens of goals their plans set forth, such as cutting statewide greenhouse gas emissions, improving infrastructure, securing water supplies, battling wildfires or coping with rising sea levels. Even those states have...

The world is warming. The beasts are dying en masse. The oceans are rising. The deserts are roasting. It's the survival of the fittest out there, guys. Who's going to win, evolutionarily speaking? Men or women? It turns out that warming temperatures may have a surprising gender bias—in favor of women. That's the conclusion of a team of Japanese researchers who have discovered a "statistically significant" association between climate change—including rising temperatures and extreme weather events—and the birth rates of boys and girls in Japan. Warmer temperatures have accompanied an increased proportion of female babies in the population, and a...

The rules put in place by the Obama administration’s Environmental Protection Agency have dealt a severe blow to the economy of the Appalachian region. The most recent proposal could be the death knell if they are enacted. More than 500 active and retired coal miners from West Virginia and other parts of Appalachia delivered that message to Washington Tuesday. The protest is the most recent demonstration against the clean power rule which would change the rules for emissions on existing coal fired power plants in the United States. The rally, led by the United Mine Workers Union, called on the...

Environmental scientists want to introduce a new system to prove that adverse weather events are directly linked to climate change to counter global warming sceptics. Under the new plan, a heatwave or major storm will be linked scientifically to man made climate change immediately after the event to prevent critics from blaming it on natural variations in the weather. Scientists want to be able to provide proof of whether an event was caused by climate change within three day rather than the current system which can take up to a year. Experts claim that such a long wait for proof...

Scientists frequently tout new evidence that climate change will drive some of the most populated cities in the United States underwater. New York, Boston and Miami are all at risk. But the impact of climate change varies even within cities, putting residents of poor neighborhoods at greatest risk of suffering from heat-related ailments, researchers say. “Cities tend to be warmer, but it’s spatially variable within cities,” says Joyce Klein Rosenthal, a researcher at Harvard who published a recent study on the impact of climate change in cities. “Generally, higher poverty neighborhoods are warmer and wealthier neighborhoods are cooler.”

Our most ancient ancestors were battling climate change to survive droughts, freezing and flooding. And now a growing number of scientists believe that shifts in the Earth’s climate are responsible for creating some of our most distinctive characteristics. Their research suggests that large evolutionary leaps, such as the development of our bigger brains and ability to create and use complex tools, coincided with periods of volatile climate change.

Global warming contributed to extreme heat waves in many parts of the world last year, but cannot be definitively linked to the California drought, according to a report released Monday. In the report, published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 20 research teams explored the causes of 16 extreme weather events recorded in 2013, including torrential downpours in Colorado, heat waves in Korea and Australia and a blizzard in South Dakota. The studies overwhelmingly showed that human-caused climate change played a role in the heat waves, in some cases making them 10 times more likely. But the report...

The savage heat waves that struck Australia in 2013 were almost certainly a direct consequence of the human release of greenhouse gases, researchers said Monday. It is perhaps the most definitive statement climate scientists have made that ties a specific weather event to global warming. Five groups of researchers, using distinct methods, analyzed the heat that baked Australia for much of last year and continued into 2014. All five came to the conclusion that last year’s heat waves could not have been as severe without the long-term climatic warming caused by human activity. “When we look at the heat across...

While President Obama challenged China at the United Nations to follow the U.S. lead in pushing for drastic reductions in national carbon emissions to save the planet from “climate change,” it appears that China has dramatically different ideas. As in: No. According to a document deposited at the UNFCCC in advance of a planned meeting next month, China insists that the U.S. and other developed countries endure most of the economic pain of carbon emission cutbacks, and need to make significantly more sacrifices in the months ahead. Carbon emission cutbacks by China and other developing countries, the document says, will...

Even as he battles ISIS and Ebola, President Obama today declared climate change the threat that will “define the contours of this century more than any other.” “Climate is changing faster than our efforts to address it. The alarm bells keep ringing. Our citizens keep marching. We cannot pretend we don’t hear them,” Obama told delegates at the U.N. Climate Summit in New York, referencing the massive demonstrations over the past few days. “We have to tackle this global threat before it’s too late.”

Junk Science: Those trying to save the planet leave trash-filled streets in advance of a U.N. climate confab that's a solution in search of a problem. Even a former administration official thinks the Earth is fine. Colorfully costumed zealots marched in New York and other cities Sunday in advance of Tuesday's U.N. Climate Summit. Once again they claimed, "The science is settled," and blamed capitalism for non-existent weather change. They barely noticed, as British climate-change skeptic Lord Christopher Monckton points out at Marc Morano's Climate Depot, the "Great Pause" in global temperatures now stands at 17 years and 11 months.

By 2080, birds like the northern saw-whet owl, the scarlet tanager and the Baltimore oriole could all but disappear from Pennsylvania. Climate change is expected to shrink and shift northward the ranges of these and hundreds of other species across North America, according to a groundbreaking National Audubon Society study. Citizen science was crucial to this report. Audubon scientists relied on tens of thousands of observations from the U.S. Geological Survey’s North American Breeding Bird Survey, along with Aubudon’s own Christmas Bird Count. It combined these observations with historical climate data and climate changes predicted in the Intergovernmental Panel on...

Carbon dioxide accumulation in the atmosphere reached a record high last year and grew at the fastest rate in 30 years, the United Nations' climate agency reported Tuesday. Wendy Watson-Wanker, executive secretary of UNESCO's Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, warned that time is running out in the mission to prevent devastating climate change. "It is high time the ocean, as the primary driver of the planet’s climate and attenuator of climate change, becomes a central part of climate change discussions,” said Watson-Wanker.

U.S. airlines may soon be required to at least start thinking about cutting their carbon footprint. The EPA last week started a rule-making process aimed at determining whether fast-growing carbon emissions from American aircraft endanger public health and welfare. The EPA action came a month after the Center for Biological Diversity and Friends of the Earth, which is represented by Earthjustice, threatened to sue the agency for failing to reduce greenhouse gas pollution from aircraft. Conservation advocates say airlines could easily make big cuts in emissions, for example by upgrading fleets with fuel-efficient planes.

FULL TITLE: Climate change could lead to raging infernos throughout Europe: Scientists predict 200% rise in forest fires by 2090. Climate change is expected to contribute to a 'dramatic increase' in forest fires in Europe, according to a new study. The research claims that increased temperatures and longer droughts will create a 200 per cent increase in raging forest infernos by 2090. However, preventive fires could keep that increase to below 50 per cent, the Austrian scientists claim.

This lawless administration plans to bypass the two-thirds requirement for Senate ratification on a climate change treaty by entering into a "politically binding" hybrid agreement to "name and shame" climate scofflaws. Apparently letting the Environmental Protection Agency run amok with regulations fulfilling candidate Obama's pledge to bankrupt the coal industry, and enact a de facto cap-and-trade regime the president couldn't get through Congress, is not enough. The man who said his nomination was the moment the seas began to recede and the planet began to heal now plans to deal the rule of law and the U.S. Constitution yet another...

To put it another way, an area the size of Alaska, America’s biggest state, was open water two years ago, but is again now covered by ice. The most widely used measurements of Arctic ice extent are the daily satellite readings issued by the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, which is co-funded by Nasa. These reveal that – while the long-term trend still shows a decline – last Monday, August 25, the area of the Arctic Ocean with at least 15 per cent ice cover was 5.62 million square kilometres. This was the highest level recorded on that...

Read his lips: No shutdown. Pushing back against a report to the contrary, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says he won’t let the government shut down if he becomes the chamber’s majority leader next year. “Of course not,” the Kentucky Republican told CNN in an interview. “Remember me? I am the guy that gets us out of shutdowns,” he said. Government shutdowns like last October’s are a “failed policy,” McConnell added.

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is working to forge a sweeping international climate change agreement to compel nations to cut their planet-warming fossil fuel emissions, but without ratification from Congress. In preparation for this agreement, to be signed at a United Nations summit meeting in 2015 in Paris, the negotiators are meeting with diplomats from other countries to broker a deal to commit some of the world’s largest economies to enact laws to reduce their carbon pollution. But under the Constitution, a president may enter into a legally binding treaty only if it is approved by a two-thirds majority of...