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A federal appeals court on Wednesday rejected the U.S. government's bid to halt a lawsuit by young people claiming that President Donald Trump and his administration are violating their constitutional rights by ignoring the harms caused by climate change. By a 3-0 vote, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said the administration had not met the "high bar" under federal law to dismiss the Oregon lawsuit, which was originally brought in 2015 against the administration of President Barack Obama. The potentially far-reaching case is one of a handful seeking to have courts address global warming and...

Greens hate foresters and grass-farmers. They want every tree protected, even woody weeds taking over ancient treeless grasslands. Red meat and forest timber are "unsustainable." Apparently, they want us to live in houses made of recycled cardboard and plastic and eating fake steak and protein powder made from methane generated from rubbish dumps. Greens despise the suburbs with their SUVs, lawns, pools, manicured parks, ponies, and golf courses. They prefer concentrated accommodation with people stacked and packed in high-rise cubic apartments, with state-controlled kindergartens in the basement and with ring-roads of electric trams and driverless cars connecting apartments, schools, offices,...

Growing up in a South African township, Ndivile Mokoena realized early that women, children and society's poorest are hit hardest by environmental issues. Now she works for gender equality and climate justice globally. Women are more likely to die as a consequence of drought, flooding or heat waves. And - as long as political and economic power lies with men - they will continue to find it more difficult adapt to dramatic changes in their environment resulting from climate change, says climate and gender activist, Ndivile Mokoena. Mokoena works for GenderCC, an organization that promotes gender equality in climate protection...

Scientists have developed new models to better understand how governments can work together to ensure global warming is limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100. The different models consider a variety of political, socioeconomic and technological factors, including the impacts of economic inequality, energy demand and regional cooperation. The models considered five different so-called Shared Socioeconomic Pathways, or SSPs. A critical value of the paper is the use of the SSPs, which has helped to systematically explore conditions under which such extreme low targets might become attainable," Keywan Riahi, energy program director at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis...

Canada's Prime Minister will be meeting with a special guest to discuss how science in Canada rules. Justin Trudeau and Bill Nye the Science Guy will be having a public discussion tomorrow about the 2018 Federal Budget, which was recently unveiled.The two will be participating in an armchair discussion at the University of Ottawa and will be highlighting investments in Canadian innovation. The 2018 budget proposes an investment of nearly $4 billion in Canada’s research system to support the work of researchers and to provide access to state-of-the-art tools and facilities.

This week, social media and mainstream media were abuzz with news about the record Arctic heat and how we humans are destroying our planet through climate change. While we brace for a barrage of climate doomsday news, here is the actual reality of climatic conditions at the Arctic and reasons why we are not in imminent danger. On 26 February, temperatures in some regions of the Arctic hovered around the freezing point (zero degree Celsius)—a record high for this time of year in the satellite era temperature readings (which began in the late 1970s). But the current rise in Arctic...

Thousands of women in Bangladesh will receive financing to develop livelihoods that can withstand the effects of climate change in one of the world's hardest-hit countries, the United Nations said. Women and girls in the disaster-prone coastal districts of Satkhira and Khulna will receive assistance from US$33 million (S$44 million) provided by the UN's Green Climate Fund and Bangladesh's Ministry of Women and Children's Affairs. "The rising sea level is a major threat to these areas," Mamunur Rashid, a climate change specialist at the UN Development Programme (UNDP), said from Dhaka. "Women are disproportionately affected by the impacts," Saleemul Huq,...

Did you know that what’s on your plate plays a larger role in contributing to climate change than the car you drive? When most wealthy people think about their carbon footprint, or their contributions to climate change, they’ll think about where their electricity and heat come from or what they drive. They’ll think about fossil fuels and miles per gallon, about LED lights and mass transit – but not so much about combine harvesters or processed meals or food waste. Few consider the impacts of the food they eat, despite the fact that globally, food systems account for roughly one...

The estimated cost of measures to limit Earth-warming greenhouse gas emissions can be more than offset by reductions in deaths and disease from air pollution, researchers said on Saturday. It would cost $22.1 trillion (17.9 trillion euros) to $41.6 trillion between 2020 and 2050 for the world to hold average global warming under two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), a team projected in The Lancet Planetary Health journal. For the lower, aspirational limit of 1.5 C, the cost would be between $39.7 trillion and $56.1 trillion, they estimated. But air pollution deaths could be reduced by 21-27 percent to about...

In less than 100 years, strolling from shop to shop along Commercial Street in Portland or running with your dog on Willard Beach in South Portland could become something folks did in the old days. Based on the latest tidal trends, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts that by the year 2100, those areas will be under at least a foot of seawater at high tide on a calm day. Under this grim scenario, Willard Beach would disappear, showing up once in a while as a narrow strip of sand at extreme low tides. The indomitable brick buildings on...

Mt. Spokane Ski and Snowboard Park’s parking lot was packed with cars on a recent weekday morning. Skiers strapped on boots amid a light snowfall, anticipating a powder day on the slopes. At the top of the chairlifts, the snow pack was about 8 feet deep – close to the seasonal average for the nonprofit ski hill in Spokane’s backyard. Future decades won’t be so kind to the resort on Mount Spokane. New research from Oregon State University indicates that today’s young skiers could see significant changes in snowpack by the time they reach middle age. By the end of...

An avalanche at Mammoth Mountain early Saturday forced the closure of the popular ski area and triggered search and rescue efforts, officials said. There were no reports of serious injuries or missing people, but emergency crews were activated, officials said.{snip} "Shortly before the slide, that area was very crowded," Maynard said. "Essentially, the top of the mountain came loose in a major avalanche."{snip} "We hiked about 15 minutes to the parking lot, where local emergency mayhem had broken out," Williams said. "There were people trying to get out any way they could; some were waiting for buses, others were sharing...

A favorite technique of the propagandists of the Global Warming scare is to find cute and cuddly creatures that they can claim are “threatened” by global warming. For years, an iconic picture of a polar bear on an ice floe was used to frighten children into clutching their stuffed teddy bears and demanding Mommy and Daddy act to save them. But the bloom started coming off that rose when a scientist who had made population estimates that allowed the bears to be classified as threatened admitted that the estimates were: “A guess to satisfy public demand” but wrapped in...

[Reuters] Link only.

A thriving "hotspot" of 1.5 million Adelie penguins, a species fast declining in parts of the world, has been discovered on remote islands off the Antarctic Peninsula, surprised scientists said Friday. The first bird census of the Danger Islands unearthed over 750,000 Adelie breeding pairs, more than the rest of the area combined, the team reported in the journal Scientific Reports. {snip} When the Landsat data originally suggested the presence of hundreds of thousands of penguins on the islands, she thought it "was a mistake". "We were surprised to find so many penguins on these islands, especially because some of...

SEATTLE (AP) — Another ambitious effort to pass a carbon tax in Washington state has faltered as both Gov. Jay Inslee and the bill's prime sponsor said Thursday that there weren't enough votes to pass the measure out of the state Senate. Washington would have been the first U.S. state to impose a straight tax on carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels like gasoline and electricity and the legislation has been closely watched nationally.

Swathes of Europe and North America have been hit by blizzards. They’re having snowball fights outside the Colosseum in Rome. Scotland is closed. The sheep outside my garden are buried in white stuff. So how lucky we are at times like these to have the liberal media explain to us dullards what’s really going on.

The Arctic is melting catastrophically! Sea ice levels are experiencing their most precipitous decline in 1500 years! Something must be done – and fast… Well, so claims the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and we know by now what that means, don’t we? Yep: the Arctic sea ice is doing just fine. Yep: yet again, the NOAA is telling porkies. As usual, Paul Homewood has got its number. First, here’s what the NOAA is claiming, as relayed in a scaremongering piece at Vox:

Scientists were surprised by the results of their study. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ In November, scientists from New Zealand used a hot water drill to go deep into Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf. The shelf, which can be up to 10,000 feet thick, is the largest of several that hold back West Antarctica's massive amounts of ice. If these were to collapse, global sea level would rise by ten feet. Drilling a hole and lowering a camera and thermometer inside is a way for researchers to understand the history of the shelf, and what is happening to it now. In measuring the temperature and...

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has yet again been caught exaggerating ‘global warming’ by fiddling with the raw temperature data. This time, that data concerns the recent record-breaking cold across the northeastern U.S. which NOAA is trying to erase from history. If you believe NOAA’s charts, there was nothing particularly unusual about this winter’s cold weather which caused sharks to freeze in the ocean and iguanas to drop out of trees.Here is NOAA’s January 2018 chart for Northeast U.S. – an area which includes New England along with NY, PA, NJ, DE and MD.