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A new statistical tool for modeling large climate and environmental datasets that has broad applications—from weather forecasting to flood warning and irrigation management—has been developed by researchers at KAUST. Ying Sun and her PhD student Huang Huang developed a new method that uses a hierarchical low-rank approximation scheme to resolve the computational burden, providing an efficient tool for fitting Gaussian process models to datasets that contain large quantities of climate and environmental measurements. The model was applied to a spatial dataset of two million soil-moisture measurements from the Mississippi River basin in the United States. They were able to fit...

The International Monetary Fund has warned the world’s richest nations to have a greater sense of urgency about climate change. The IMF’s latest World Economic Outlook (WEO), released overnight, has dedicated an entire chapter to the impact of weather shocks and climate change on global economic activity. It warns coping with climate change will be one of the “fundamental challenges” of the 21st century, saying richer countries must help low-income economies adapt to rapidly increasing temperatures. “Climate change is a negative global externality of potentially catastrophic proportions and only collective action and multilateral cooperation can effectively address its causes and...

The Midwest is safe from hurricanes and drought-driven wildfires. But that does not mean the region and its roads and bridges are free from the threat of climate change, a new study warns. Higher temperatures and unusually heavy rain events in the Midwest spell trouble for transportation and infrastructure systems, according to a study released Tuesday by the Midwest Economic Policy Institute. The group is a division of the Illinois Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank whose members include representatives from the construction industry and labor unions. “Rising temperatures and the likelihood of more storms and flooding reduce the...

It’s been a terrifying season for what we used to call natural disasters. It is tempting to look at this string of disasters and think, Climate change is here. As the journalist Malcolm Harris put it blithely on Twitter, “There didn’t used to be a major natural disaster every single day.” But the truth is actually far scarier than “welcome to the new normal.” The climate system we have been observing since August, the one that has pummeled the planet again and again and exposed even the world’s wealthiest country as unable (or at least unwilling) to properly respond to...

The Trump administration formally proposed on Tuesday to roll back yet another of President Barack Obama’s efforts to position the United States as a global leader in the fight against climate change. The move, though widely anticipated, was deeply disheartening. All this is infuriating on several levels. It repeated the same false narrative that congressional Republicans have been peddling for years and that Mr. Trump’s minions are peddling now — that environmental regulations are job killers, that restraining greenhouse gas emissions will damage the economy, that the way forward lies in digging more coal and punching more holes in the...

After more than two decades of study I am convinced that life here on Earth has been getting better and better for the billions of we people who make this little blue marble our beloved home. The “tons and tons of carbon we are spewing into the atmosphere every day” as Al Gore puts it are actually a good thing. In his rants that the Earth will become uninhabitable former Vice President Gore is referring the carbon dioxide gas being released into the atmosphere as we power our civilization with fossil fuels. However, it turns out that as the...

A lawyer for an environmental activist convicted of targeting an oil pipeline in North Dakota said he doesn't think a judge's decision disallowing the threat of global warming as a defense to justify the crime would be grounds for an appeal. Defendant Michael Foster, of Seattle, said he has not decided whether to appeal his jury conviction to the North Dakota Supreme Court, and part of him wants "to honor the judge and the jury and their verdict." Foster took part in effort on Oct. 11, 2016, to draw attention to climate change by turning off valves on five pipelines...

HAZARD, Ky. (AP) — A coalition of left-leaning states and environmental groups are vowing to fight the Trump administration's move to kill an Obama-era effort to limit carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants. Speaking Monday in the coal-mining state of Kentucky, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt said he would be issuing a new set of rules overriding the Clean Power Plan, the centerpiece of President Barack Obama's drive to curb global climate change. "The war on coal is over," Pruitt declared, adding that no federal agency should ever use its authority to "declare war on any sector of our...

The arrival of record-shattering hurricanes, forest fires in the West the size of Maryland, and collapsing glaciers makes something clear to anyone not in a state of ideological denial: Humanity is in a fight for its survival, and if we have any hope of saving ourselves from endless climate disasters, we must radically change the political climate first. With no time left to debate the delusional dogmas of climate denialism, we must develop policies to break quickly and permanently from the carbon economy and invest in renewable energy and a far more resilient national infrastructure. It's not too late to...

Keeping up the (false) drumbeat that manmade global warming is causing more frequent and stronger hurricanes, lots of media outlets, following the spectacular Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, have proclaimed 2017 the first time in the 166 years of records in which two Category-4 hurricanes made landfall on the mainland United States in the same year.Among them were USA Today, PBS, Forbes, Fortune, Slate, The Daily Beast, Business Insider, New York Magazine, Townhall.com, and even Scientific American.  Like them, Weather.com reported on September 10:Harvey and Irma both made a U.S. landfall as Category 4 hurricanes.Two Atlantic hurricanes of this intensity have never...

Global leaders must do more to protect indigenous people fighting to protect their land and way of life if the world is to limit climate change, according to the UN special rapporteur Victoria Tauli-Corpuz. Speaking ahead of key climate talks in Bonn next month she urged politicians to recognise that indigenous communities around the world were the most effective custodians of millions of hectares of forest “which act as the world’s lungs”. “Indigenous people’s rights need to be protected in the best way possible, not just for them but because they are also able to provide solutions to many of...

If you want to do something about global warming, look under your feet. Managed well, soil’s ability to trap carbon dioxide is potentially much greater than previously estimated, according to Stanford researchers who claim the resource could “significantly” offset increasing global emissions. They call for a reversal of federal cutbacks to related research programs to learn more about this valuable resource. “Dirt is not exciting to most people,” said Earth system science professor Rob Jackson, lead author of the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics article. “But it is a no-risk climate solution with big co-benefits. Fostering soil health...

The amount of carbon dioxide that humans will have released into the atmosphere by 2100 may be enough to trigger a sixth mass extinction, a new study suggests. The huge spike in CO2 levels over the past century may put the world dangerously close to a "threshold of catastrophe," after which environmental instability and mass die-offs become inevitable, the new mathematical analysis finds. Even if a mass extinction is in the cards, however, it likely wouldn't be evident immediately. Rather, the process could take 10,000 years to play out, said study co-author Daniel Rothman, a geophysicist at the Massachusetts...

Commercial airliners will be buffeted by up to three times more turbulence in future decades, according to a new report. Experts have warned the risk of mid-air injuries will rise and passengers can expect to spend more time confined to their seats with the seatbelt sign switched on due to rougher skies disturbed by climate change. On some popular routes for UK travellers, such as transatlantic flights, instances of severe turbulence will increase by 180 per cent, while over Europe the rate is set to worsen by 160 per cent. Scientists had already noticed that so-called clear-air turbulence (CAT) was...

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said on Wednesday he hoped recent devastating hurricanes in the Caribbean and southern United States would convince climate change skeptics like U.S. President Donald Trump that global warming is a “major threat.” Guterres, who will visit the Caribbean islands this weekend to see damage from last month’s hurricanes said the world must be more determined in pushing for ”a clean, sustainable energy future.”“I have not yet lost my hope that what is happening will be making those that are still skeptical about climate change to be more and more realizing that this, indeed, is a...

Climate change may cause nearly three times as much clear-air turbulence as current conditions by the period between 2050 and 2080, according to a study released today. Flights over the north Atlantic may experience as much as 180 percent more severe turbulence, or in-flight bumpiness stronger than gravity and able to shake passengers in a plane’s cabin, according to the study, published in the Geophysical Research Letters journal. Flights over North America may experience an additional 110 percent, and flights over Europe up to 160 percent more. “What air travelers can expect is to be confined to their seat for...

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will propose repealing the Clean Power Plan - the Obama administration’s centerpiece regulation to fight climate change - and plans to solicit input on a rule to replace it, according to an EPA document seen by Reuters. The decision marks the agency’s first formal step to sweep away the rule intended to cut carbon emissions from power plants, after President Donald Trump signed an executive order in March launching the EPA’s review. The Republican president has expressed doubts about the science of climate change and has blamed former Democratic President Barack Obama’s efforts to cut...

Note: This piece was co-authored by H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D.In the world of science, debates rarely end. Only after years of careful analyses, rigorous scientific studies, and the replication of findings can scientists safely declare they believe a theory has likely been proven. And even then, real scientists know virtually every scientific conclusion is subject to further debate and experimentation as additional insights are discovered.On the topic of the science of climate change, including the causes and potential dangers, the debate is still very much alive and well. But the current climate-change debate held in most public forums, including in...

The debate on man-made climate change on planet Earth has ignited to a fever-pitch. It is hard to believe the science guy, Bill Nye, is open to jail time for climate change dissenters. Yes, it has gone that far. But it has gotten much worse than what Bill Nye said. The following has totally shocked me: https://www.cato.org/blog/sen-whitehouse-bring-rico-charges-against-climate-wrongthink QUOTE Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) urges the U.S. Department of Justice to consider filing a racketeering suit against the oil and coal industries for having promoted wrongful thinking on climate change, with the activities of “conservative policy” groups an apparent target of the...

Branson along with Bill Gates, Cargill, and Kimball Musk, backed the Memphis Meats clean-meat startup in its $17 million Series A round, which went on to raise in excess of $22 million. Memphis Meats will join a cadre of sustainable food businesses such as the three Israeli companies — Meat the Future, Future Meat Technologies, and SuperMeat — which will supply food to China as part of a $300 million deal. Branson, who gave up meat in 2014, appears to be investing in alignment with his beliefs and predictions about the future, all while trying to act against the deforestation...