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Dr. Ben Carson has spent most of his professional career as a man of science, which is why the Republican presidential candidate’s recent remarks on climate change have been puzzling to many. In a recent interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, the neurosurgeon claimed “I know there are a lot of people who say ‘overwhelming science,’ but then when you ask them to show the overwhelming science, they never can show it. There is no overwhelming science that the things that are going on are man-caused and not naturally caused.” The comment soon drew a rebuke from Democratic California Gov....

Burning all the world’s deposits of coal, oil and natural gas would raise the temperature enough to melt the entire ice sheet covering Antarctica, driving the level of the sea up by more than 160 feet, scientists reported Friday.In a major surprise to the scientists, they found that half the melting could occur in as little as a thousand years, causing the ocean to rise by something on the order of a foot per decade, roughly 10 times the rate at which it is rising now. Such a pace would almost certainly throw human society into chaos, forcing a rapid...

Today's Saturday Summary from @BigJoeBastardi: the upcoming winter, balance of tropical season, arctic sea ice: http://t.co/3mA1lMh4du

DENVER (CBS4) – Colorado’s 2015-2016 Winter season may be one for the record books as El Niño conditions strengthen in the Pacific Ocean. The El Niño forecast released by NOAA suggests a colder winter with more snowfall than normal. Ocean temperatures in the equatorial Pacific have been as much as four degrees warmer than average over the past few months. Historically, this setup has brought more moisture into the state during the winter months, especially southwestern Colorado, but Denver has also seen its largest snowstorms during El Niño years.

“Scientists fear ‘Day After Tomorrow’ climate change,” shouts the headline on MSNBC. According to two new studies, global warming could (supposedly) shut down ocean circulation. This could drop vast stretches of Asia into drought and expose the entire Northern Hemisphere to severe ice and snow. “This change would be sudden and sharp enough to roil civilization—happening in as little as three years and resulting in as much as an 18-degree Fahrenheit drop in average temperatures,” says this article by Tony Dokoupil. Dokoupil tells the story of Jud Partin, a geophysicist at the University of Texas, who gathered new geological data...

Am I the only one who finds it incongruous that President Obama, when on a carefully choreographed trip to Alaska that highlighted global warming, announced the accelerated acquisition of ice breakers? During his trip, he told Alaskans that by the end of this century, Alaska will see “warming of between 6 and 12 degrees,” which he explained: “means more melting.” Six to 12 degrees is a lot of warming, therefore, a lot of melting—which would seem to require fewer ice breakers not more. I applaud the attempt to catch up, as I’ve written previously, I think America is woefully...

Our nation's youngest icebreaker – US Coast Guard Cutter Healy – is all grown up, becoming the first US surface ship Saturday to make the trip to the North Pole unaccompanied. Submarines normally follow ships underneath the ice. Admittedly, "all grown up" might be the wrong phrase, Healy is a 420-foot, 16,000-ton, 30,000-horsepower ship, that’s capable of breaking more than 10 feet of ice. The vessel made the journey from Dutch Harbor, Alaska, in less than a month, powering through the frigid water and enormous blocks of ice one week ahead of schedule. In addition to helping the Coast Guard’s...

A few days ago the global warming alarmist comedy act was that rising sea levels would flood NASA launch sites. It would be tough to top that inadvertent humor but the Washington Post science blogger, Rachel Feltman, gives it a good challenge. She warns that melting arctic ice could release a giant deadly virus. If it sounds like cheesy horror movie, you could be right as we shall see but first, take it away Rachel!

Full title: Many global warming studies may be wrong as carbon dating found to be highly unreliable for organic matter over 30,000 years old Radiocarbon dating, which is used to calculate the age of certain organic materials, has been found to be unreliable, and sometimes wildly so - a discovery that could upset previous studies on climate change, scientists from China and Germany said in a new paper. Their recent analysis of sediment from the largest freshwater lake in northeast China showed that its carbon clock stopped ticking as early as 30,000 years ago, or nearly half as long as...

Let's get one thing out of the way really quickly: The ancient, giant virus recently discovered in melting Arctic ice is not going to kill you. But here's the bad news: It's not the first ancient virus that scientists have found frozen — it's the fourth found since 2003. And you can be sure it won't be the last. And with climate change causing massive melts, it's not totally alarmist to suggest that something deadly might one day emerge from a long, icy sleep. As if climate change didn't already suck enough, right?

The United Nations body that oversees greenhouse gas reductions is reeling from another cap-and-trade scandal that may have put 600 million tons of carbon emissions into the atmosphere — roughly speaking, the annual CO2 output of Canada or Britain — while the emissions were ostensibly suppressed, according to an independent study. In the process, the fraudsters, largely in Russia and Ukraine, were likely able to transfer credits for more than 400 million tons of their apparently bogus greenhouse savings by April 2015 into Europe's commercial carbon trading system — the largest in the world — thereby undermining that continent's ambitious...

A new but controversial study asks if an end is coming to the busy Atlantic hurricane seasons of recent decades. The Atlantic looks like it is entering in to a new quieter cycle of storm activity, like in the 1970s and 1980s, two prominent hurricane researchers wrote Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience

(CNN)—NASA's rockets are astounding machines, capable of blasting into space at thousands of miles per hour and withstanding temperatures twice the melting point of steel. But they can't take off underwater. Rising sea levels caused by melting ice caps threaten to disrupt a handful of NASA launch sites along U.S. coastlines, the space agency warns. In the coming years, launch facilities at Florida's Kennedy Space Center and other places may need to be retrofitted or even moved inland, NASA says. "Every NASA center has its own set of vulnerabilities, and some are more at risk than others," NASA climatologist...

Glacier National Park, the top of Logan Pass has been temporarily shut down again, this time because of snow. Glacier announced over the weekend that a section of the Going-to-the-Sun Road between Big Bend on the west side and Jackson Glacier Overlook on the east side is temporarily closed because of winter weather conditions.

"The United States of America cannot afford to bet our long-term prosperity, our long-term security on a resource that will eventually run out, and even before it runs out will get more and more expensive to extract from the ground." -- Barack Obama, 2011. In August 1859 on the eve of the Civil War, Col. Edwin Laurentine Drake completed the first commercial oil well in the United States on Oil Creek just outside of Titusville, Pa. Over the next century and a half, oil and gas companies have extracted tens of billions of barrels of oil from the ground...

Recap of winter forecast, current state of global sea ice. Current SST/El Niño/SOI. Three to fifteen day forecast.

The global extent and distribution of forest trees is central to our understanding of the terrestrial biosphere. We provide the first spatially continuous map of forest tree density at a global scale. This map reveals that the global number of trees is approximately 3.04 trillion, an order of magnitude higher than the previous estimate. Of these trees, approximately 1.39 trillion exist in tropical and subtropical forests, with 0.74 trillion in boreal regions and 0.61 trillion in temperate regions. Biome-level trends in tree density demonstrate the importance of climate and topography in controlling local tree densities at finer scales, as well...

Every so often you will see articles warning that some species is going extinct. And usually it's not really a species -- you never hear about "leopards" going extinct, usually it's "purple dotted left handed bisexual Nepalese leopards" or some subvariety.  We are assured they are going extinct because fewer have been seen recently. But the Earth is so big, how can we really be sure that some subspecies is going extinct just because we see fewer of them? After all, only three percent of the land mass of the Earth is urbanized. Animals could easily be hidden in...

There are just over three trillion trees in the world, a figure that dwarfs previous estimates, according to the most comprehensive census yet of global forestation. Using satellite imagery as well as ground-based measurements from around the world, a team led by researchers at Yale University created the first globally comprehensive map of tree density. Their findings were published in the journal Nature on Wednesday. A previous study that drew on satellite imagery estimated that the total number of trees was around 400 billion. The new estimate of 3.04 trillion is multiple times that number, bringing the ratio of trees...