Free Republic

A study that measures the human toll of air pollution from global manufacturing and trade shows how buying goods made far away can lead to premature deaths both there and close to home. More than 750,000 people die prematurely from dirty air every year that is generated by making goods in one location that will be sold elsewhere, about one-fifth of the 3.45 million premature deaths from air pollution. The study says 12 percent of those deaths, about 411,000 people, are a result of air pollution that has blown across national borders. “It’s not a local issue anymore,” said study...

Few of President Barack Obama’s achievements seem more imperiled from President Trump than progress in combating climate change. To avert catastrophic climate change, the broadly accepted goal among climate scientists is to stay below two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming over preindustrial temperatures. By helping negotiate the 2015 climate agreement in Paris and setting up a regulatory framework for fossil fuel emissions domestically, Obama created conditions that are necessary, but insufficient, to get there. The plan was for his successor to go further by increasing the ambition of Obama’s climate rules, cracking down on methane leakage and completing...

That didn’t take long. Only 10 weeks into his presidency, and at great risk to future generations, Donald Trump has ordered the demolition of most of President Barack Obama’s policies to combat climate change by reducing emissions from fossil fuels. The assault began with Mr. Trump’s pledge in Detroit to roll back fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks, continued with a stingy budget plan that would end funding for climate-related scientific programs and reached an unhappy apex Tuesday with an executive order that, among things, would rescind the centerpiece of Mr. Obama’s clean power strategy, a rule that would...

President Trump issued a sweeping executive order on Tuesday that will begin to undo a slew of government efforts to fight global warming. Among those worrying and watching to see how the executive order plays out are scientists who actually are in favor of exploring bold interventions to artificially cool the climate. Just a year ago, some hoped that the U. S. government would start funding such research and take a leadership role. Back then, advocates for the work saw public funding as ideal, because it would foster transparency, accountability and public trust. But now that the Trump administration is...

It could have been angry and defiant. It could have been despondent and fatalistic. Or worse, it could have been rosy and effervescent. "It" was the 34th training session of Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project Leadership Corps, and the first since the November election. And it managed to thread the needle — not sugar-coating the scale of the climate challenge, or denying the onslaught of setbacks, yet still inspiring appreciation for the many gains being made, belief in our power to do more and hope that we will do it fast enough. That hope is surely needed now more than...

Here’s a question that Stanford climatologist Noah Diffenbaugh gets asked a lot lately: “Why did California receive so much rain lately if we’re supposed to be in the middle of a record-setting drought?” When answering, he will often refer the questioner to a Discover magazine story published in 1988, when Diffenbaugh was still in middle school. The article, written by veteran science writer Andrew Revkin, detailed how a persistent rise in global temperatures would affect California’s water system. It predicted that as California warmed, more precipitation would fall as rain rather than snow, and more of the snow that did...

In the atmosphere, the seas and around the poles, climate change is reaching disturbing new levels across the Earth. That's according to a detailed global analysis from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). It says that 2016 was not only the warmest year on record, but it saw atmospheric CO2 rise to a new high, while Arctic sea ice recorded a new winter low. "This increase in global temperature is consistent with other changes occurring in the climate system," said WMO Secretary-General, Petteri Taalas. "Globally averaged sea-surface temperatures were also the warmest on record, global sea-levels continued to rise, and Arctic...

A new report claims policies to keep future global warming to internationally agreed upon limits by the end of the century could make the world $19 trillion richer. The report by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) was one of two commissioned by the German government to help convince President Donald Trump to stay in the Paris agreement. If IRENA’s top-line findings sound too good to be true, that’s because they might be. The world would have to put $145 trillion into low-carbon energy to become $19 trillion richer by 2050 — a 13 percent return on investment over 33...

March has provided an unexpected dose of winter, but a freakishly balmy February broke more than 11,700 local daily records for warmth in the United States. An international science team calculated that man-made global warming tripled the likelihood for the nation’s unusually warm month. The team, known as World Weather Attribution, uses accepted scientific techniques to figure if climate change plays a role in extreme events based on computer simulations of real-world conditions and of a world without heat-trapping gases. Natural random weather variations and climate change combined to make it a weird February, meteorologists said. Overall, NOAA said it...

A new survey confirms climate change research published in peer-reviewed scientific journals is untainted by so-called publication bias. If a study's conclusion, not the quality of its content, impacts whether or not it gets published, the partiality is referred to as "publication bias." Some have claimed publication bias explains the dearth of studies challenging the man-made climate change consensus. A new study by scientists at Lund University in Sweden suggests the consensus -- that global warming is happening, and happening as a result of greenhouse emissions -- is based on a sober analysis and reporting of the facts, not collusion...

Animals could start shrinking because of global warming, scientists have predicted, after discovering that mammals became ‘dwarfed’ in a similar episode of climate change 50 million years ago. Paleontologists discovered the fossil teeth belonging to an early ancestor of modern horses as well as a rabbit-sized hoofed mammal. “Dwarfing appears to be a common evolutionary response of some mammals during past global warming events, and the extent of dwarfing seems related to the magnitude of the event,” said lead author Dr Abigail Ambrosia, of the University of New Hampshire. “Abrupt perturbations of the global carbon cycle during the early Eocene...

Patients should be prepared for future meetings with their doctors to include discussions of global warming. Under a political advocacy campaign launched Wednesday, a coalition of physician groups will tell the public that their health is threatened by catastrophic man-made global warming, also called climate change. The Medical Society Consortium on Climate & Health is led by Dr. Mona Surfaty, Director of the Program on Climate and Health in the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University. "Here's the message from America's doctors on climate change: it's not only happening in the Arctic Circle, it's happening here,” Surfaty...

Seventeen congressional Republicans signed a resolution on Wednesday vowing to seek "economically viable" ways to stave off global warming, challenging the stated views of President Donald Trump, who has called climate change a hoax. Republicans Elise Stefanik of New York, Carlos Curbelo of Florida and Ryan Costello of Pennsylvania introduced the legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives, pledging to "study and address the causes and effects of measured changes to our global and regional climates" and seek ways to "balance human activities" that contribute. Several Republicans who signed the resolution, which is non-binding, represent parts of the country most...

UK scientists are warning they may be unable to carry out crucial research on climate change if Donald Trump cuts climate science funding in the US. Trump tweeted in 2014 that research on global warming is “very expensive bullshit” that “has to stop”. Scientists are braced to find out whether his administration will put these words into practice. The early signs are not good. British scientists say moves to squeeze funding of climate-related research in the US – and of facilities at government laboratories in particular – could be disastrous for work in the UK. And they say Trump’s travel...

It's a dream many city-dwellers long for: moving to a spacious house surrounded by greenery in the countryside, where they plan to raise their family. In 1996, Heather Shepherd, now 50, and her family did just that. But two years later, not long after work was completed on their rural home, they got a sign of what it really meant to live in their new village: It was prone to flooding. With floods -- as well as storms, heat waves and droughts -- expected to increase in frequency thanks to climate change, the impact such trauma may have on the...

In his first address to Congress, President Donald Trump rattled off a litany of supposed threats to the United States – immigrants, Muslims and regulations among them. But on climate change – the greatest real existential threat facing humanity – Trump didn't say a single word. In short, denying the reality of climate change is now the official policy of the United States government. If there was ever any doubt, Trump's Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt made it explicit when he told reporters recently that he "would not agree" that carbon emissions are "a primary contributor to the global...

<p>Unusual weather in the Southwest could cause a nationwide salad shortage later this month. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg (lettuce): Scientists say the weird weather is probably caused by climate change - which means these sorts of problems are likely to happen again.</p>

February’s quarterly auction of carbon dioxide emission allowances under California’s cap and trade program was another financial washout for the state. Results for last week’s auction were posted Wednesday morning, revealing that just 16.5 percent of the 74.8 million metric tons of emission allowances were sold at the floor price of $13.57 per ton. The paltry auction revenues will likely stall Gov. Jerry Brown’s 2017-18 budget plan to spend $2.2 billion on a variety of climate-related programs and projects, including $800 million on his bullet train project.

Californians are in shock that after five years of too little water, the problem now is too much. Some are calling this a wake-up call for California as climate change could bring similar damage. But this shouldn't be a surprise, says Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University. "It's actually exactly what has been predicted by scientists for at least 30 years," he says. He says California is likely to see more extreme flooding with climate change. And the reason is pretty simple. If it's warmer, storms produce more rain instead of snow. But that's not what California's water...

Climate change is taking an obvious physical toll on earth: from depleted farmland to the rise of toxic pollution to the degradation of long-stable ecosystems to the disappearance of biodiversity and endangered species. But looking beyond the physical, experts are also trying to sound the alarm about the quieter, more insidious effects of climate change: namely, that global warming is threatening the emotional health of humans worldwide. “We see a sense of despair that sets in as inevitably Mother Nature, who we think of as our nurturing force, tells us we’re not going to be able to survive the conditions...