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New research finds solar power plants increase local temperatures, meaning researchers must find ways to bring them back down. ___ Researchers have found that solar power plants raise temperatures in their immediate environments. The study, which appeared in Nature Scientific Reports, revealed that nighttime temperatures over photovoltaic power plants were regularly 3-4 degrees Celsius warmer than in surrounding areas. While these effects are likely offset by the benefits of solar power, lead author Greg Barron-Gafford says it is worth looking at ways to mitigate them. We speak with him about the findings and their implications.

You don't have to be sued by Michael E Mann to have a certain antipathy toward him. It's been fascinating to discover how many people there are who believe in "anthropogenic global warming" and believe in climate science but really, strongly dislike Mann, his methods, and his promotion of himself as sole proprietor of Global Warming, Inc. I quoted a few of them the other day, but you have to be both secure in your career and have a certain toughness to come out against him in public. Here's a small case study. Michael Liebrich lives in London. He's a...

Sixteen years into the mysterious ‘global-warming hiatus’, scientists are piecing together an explanation.___ For several years, scientists wrote off the stall as noise in the climate system: the natural variations in the atmosphere, oceans and biosphere that drive warm or cool spells around the globe. But the pause has persisted, sparking a minor crisis of confidence in the field. Although there have been jumps and dips, average atmospheric temperatures have risen little since 1998, in seeming defiance of projections of climate models and the ever-increasing emissions of greenhouse gases. Climate sceptics have seized on the temperature trends as evidence that...

When Thomas Steyer — a San Francisco billionaire and major Democratic donor — discusses climate change, he feels as if one of two things is true: What he’s saying is blindingly obvious, or insane. It’s a somewhat shocking statement for someone who’s in the running to succeed the cerebral Steven Chu as energy secretary. Granted, he’s a long shot — the leading contender is MIT professor Ernest Moniz, who served as the department’s undersecretary during the Clinton administration — but his backers say his strength lies in combining business savvy with an activist’s passion. But it’s not as if Steyer,...

Full AR5 draft leaked here, contains game-changing admission of enhanced solar forcing (Alec Rawls) I participated in “expert review” of the Second Order Draft of AR5 (the next IPCC report), Working Group 1 (“The Scientific Basis”), and am now making the full draft available to the public. I believe that the leaking of this draft is entirely legal, that the taxpayer funded report report is properly in the public domain under the Freedom of Information Act, and that making it available to the public is in any case protected by established legal and ethical standards, but web hosting companies are...

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home had many convinced that whales could save the world. Now, a new study gives that science fiction premise some scientific proof. It's not the whales themselves, but their poo that is apparently very beneficial to the environment because it helps produce oxygen and it helps fight carbon dioxide. The timing for the study couldn't be better. This is the time for great whale watching up and down the coast of California as the annual migration process gets into full swing. All those whales we see are using the ocean as a toilet along the...

In its 2007 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forecast a sea level rise of between 19 and 59 centimetres by 2100, but this excluded "future rapid dynamical changes in ice flow". "Larger rises cannot be excluded but understanding of these effects is too limited to assess their likelihood," the IPCC report stated. Even before it was released, the report was outdated. Researchers now know far more. And while we still don't understand the dynamics of ice sheets and glaciers well enough to make precise predictions, we are narrowing down the possibilities. The good news is that some...

My response to the letter from Dr. Martin Parkinson, Secretary of the Australian Department of Climate Change, is available, along with this note, on my web site. Thanks to the many people who provided comments on my draft response, including Steve Hatfield-Dodds, a senior official within the Australian Department of Climate Change. I appreciate the willingness of the Australian government to engage in this discussion. I believe that you will find the final letter to be significantly improved over the draft version. Several people admonished me for informal language, which detracts from credibility, and attempts at humor with an insulting...

WASHINGTON — Ron Ace says that his breakthrough moments have come at unexpected times — while he lay in bed, eased his aging Cadillac across the Chesapeake Bay bridge or steered a tractor around his rustic, five-acre property. In the seclusion of his Maryland home, Ace has spent three years glued to the Internet, studying the Earth's climate cycles and careening from one epiphany to another — a 69-year-old loner with the moxie to try to solve one of the greatest threats to mankind. Now, backed by a computer model, the little-known inventor is making public a U.S. patent petition...

New South Wales in Australia has experienced unseasonably heavy snowfall, as summer approaches on the continent. The weekend's cold snap has provided the best snowfall of Australia's ski season, which is now drawing to a close.

The fate of scores of new coal-burning power plants is now in limbo over whether to regulate heat-trapping greenhouse gases. The uncertainty resulted when an Environmental Protection Agency appeals panel on Thursday rejected a federal permit for a Utah plant, leaving the issue for the Obama administration to resolve. The panel said the EPA's Denver office failed to adequately support its decision to issue a permit for the Bonanza plant without requiring controls on carbon dioxide, the leading pollutant linked to global warming. The matter was sent back to that office, which must better explain why it failed to order...

It has plagued scientists and politicians for decades, but scientists now say global warming is not the problem. We are actually heading for the next Ice Age, they claim. British and Canadian experts warned the big freeze could bury the east of Britain in 6,000ft of ice. Most of Scotland, Northern Ireland and England could be covered in 3,000ft-thick ice fields. The expanses could reach 6,000ft from Aberdeen to Kent – towering above Ben Nevis, Britain’s tallest mountain. And what's more, the experts blame the global change on falling - rather than climbing - levels of greenhouse gases. Lead author...

A statewide cap on driving? Here’s the thing nobody is quite willing to say out loud about implementing California’s climate change law in the land use arena: The state may have to place an overall cap on vehicle miles traveled (VMT), even as it must accommodate more growth. Last Friday at UCLA Extension’s annual Land Use Law and Planning Conference, keynote speaker Anthony Eggert, senior policy advisor at the California Air Resources Board, issued what amounted to a plea for help from the 400 land use practitioners gathered in the room. CARB is charged with implementing AB 32. Land use...

Presidential candidates traditionally blow off the environment as an issue. But can they continue to dither as the world heats up? Sierra asks four savvy election junkies when we'll see the campaign slogan: It's Global Warming, Stupid! ___ "What should be the nation's top concern?" When pollsters pose such a question to voters, few, historically, have answered "the environment." Yet when asked specifically about how important global warming will be to their vote for U.S. president in 2008, more than half of respondents to a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll last May answered "extremely" or "very." To learn how the quadrennial...

Stranded polar bears, melting glaciers, dried-out rivers and flooding on a horrific scale - these were the iconic images of 2007. So who is most able to stop this destruction to our world? A Guardian panel, taking nominations from key environmental figures, met to compile a list of our ultimate green heroes...

In a high-end Mumbai neighborhood, Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani's personal high-rise, named Antilia, is under construction. When completed, the 24-story family home will include its own health club, terraced sky-gardens and 50-seat screening room. Antilia also boasts three helipads and a 168-car garage. This may sound like transportation overkill, if not outright eco-terrorism, for a family of six. But despite its 38-to-1 car-to-person ratio, Antilia has been billed by its American architects as a "green building." And under the leading standards for green architecture, it will likely qualify. Antilia's architects, Perkins & Will of Chicago, plan to evaluate its greenness...

What started out as a moderate global warm-up about 55 million years ago triggered a massive injection of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that sent temperatures skyrocketing, a new study says. The finding suggests that today's temperature rise may just be priming the planet for a carbon belch of epic proportions."You've got these feedbacks, these chain reactions of events in the atmosphere-ocean system," said Appy Sluijs, a paleoecologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Sluijs and his colleagues found evidence for the chain reaction in two sections of sediment that accumulated on an ocean floor in what is now New...

One of the most eminent scientists of our time says that global warming is irreversible — and that more than 6 billion people will perish by the end of the century ___ At the age of eighty-eight, after four children and a long and respected career as one of the twentieth century's most influential scientists, James Lovelock has come to an unsettling conclusion: The human race is doomed. "I wish I could be more hopeful," he tells me one sunny morning as we walk through a park in Oslo, where he is giving a talk at a university. Lovelock is...

.... the fact remains that sources of non-CO2 greenhouse gases are responsible for virtually all the global warming we’re seeing, and all the global warming we are going to see for the next fifty years. If we wish to curb global warming over the coming half century, we must look at strategies to address non-CO2 emissions. The strategy with the most impact is vegetarianism.

Proponents of pacts such as Kyoto want us to spend enormous sums of money doing little good for the planet a hundred years from now. We need to find a smarter way. The first step is to start focusing resources on making carbon emissions cuts much easier. The typical cost of cutting a ton of carbon dioxide is currently about $20. Yet, according to a wealth of scientific literature, the damage from a ton of carbon in the atmosphere is about $2. Spending $20 to do $2 worth of good is not smart policy. It may make you feel good,...