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Failed Prognostications of Climate Alarm Anthony Watts / 11 hours ago August 7, 2018 By Rob Bradley writing at IER “If the current pace of the buildup of these gases continues, the effect is likely to be a warming of 3 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit [between now and] the year 2025 to 2050…. The rise in global temperature is predicted to … caus[e] sea levels to rise by one to four feet by the middle of the next century.”— Philip Shabecoff, “Global Warming Has Begun.” New York Times, June 24, 1988. It has been 30 years since the alarm bell was...

Deadly fires have scorched swaths of the Northern Hemisphere this summer, from California to Arctic Sweden and down to Greece on the sunny Mediterranean. Drought in Europe has turned verdant land barren, while people in Japan and Korea are dying from record-breaking heat. Climate change is here and is affecting the entire globe -- not just the polar bears or tiny islands vulnerable to rising sea levels -- scientists say. It is on the doorsteps of everyday Americans, Europeans and Asians, and the best evidence shows it will get much worse. Remarkably, scientists can now work out in just a...

Leaders from Caribbean islands are urging President Donald Trump to take climate change seriously before they disappear due to extreme weather conditions, according to reports. Hurricane season poses an existential threat to the islands as increased rainfall caused by climate change makes hurricanes stronger, experts say. Recently, leaders from the Caribbean began urging Trump to understand the gravity of global warming. “In 2017, we saw some of the most devastating and destructive hurricanes we’ve seen in our history,” Selwin Hart, Barbados’ ambassador to the U.S. told The Guardian. “This needs to be recognized.... This isn’t some scientific debate, it’s a...

This is the summer when, for many, climate change got real. The future looks fiery and dangerous. Hot on the heels of Trump, fake news and the parlous state of the Brexit negotiations, despair is in the air. Now a new scientific report makes the case that even fairly modest future carbon dioxide emissions could set off a cascade of catastrophe, with melting permafrost releasing methane to ratchet up global temperatures enough to drive much of the Amazon to die off, and so on in a chain reaction around the world that pushes Earth into a terrifying new hothouse state...

During the rise of mammals, Earth's temperatures spiked in a scary way that the planet may experience again soon. They were strange days at the beginning of the age of mammals. The planet was still hungover from the astonishing disappearance of its marquee superstars, the dinosaurs. But the most striking feature of this early age of mammals is that it was almost unbelievably hot, so hot that around 50 million years ago there were crocodiles, palm trees, and sand tiger sharks in the Arctic Circle. There were perhaps sprawling, febrile dead zones spanning the tropics, too hot even for animal...

Geese have a problem. Some are arriving at their Arctic mating grounds so exhausted they’re not in the mood anymore. Shifting environmental signals are making the birds race northward on their spring migration, flying faster and skipping the stops they normally use to rest and refuel, said a study in the journal Current Biology. The finding gives new insight into the way climate change is altering the calculus of animal migration. “This is the first one I know of where a long distance migrant is increasing its travel speed,” said Matthew Ayres, a biology professor at Dartmouth. Barnacle geese spend...

An unprecedented global heatwave has shattered records in nearly every corner of the planet. Death Valley set a new record. Cities in the Middle East have seen record hot days. There were days in India where it was so hot outside that conditions were nearly unlivable for human beings. Hundreds of people have died from heatstroke worldwide this summer. Heatwaves are now causing more deaths in U.S. cities than all other disasters combined. These sorts of the extreme heatwave events have been predicted for decades by scientists. We've known for some time now that extreme weather events like extraordinarily hot...

Motorists may be taxed on the distance they drive rather than paying excise on fuel at petrol station pumps, under plans proposed by senior officials. The Government is considering numerous schemes to ensure the overall tax take from motoring does not drop significantly as a result of moves to lower emission vehicles. The Department of Finance has outlined a series of options on how to ensure the exchequer does not lose out, such as a fixed charge on the purchase of every car, no matter how low its emissions levels are. Recent policy has been designed to encourage motorists to...

A new study out Monday warns of the possibility of out-of-control global warming if humans fail to band together to fight the worst effects of climate change. The analysis, conducted by researchers at the Australian National University and the Stockholm Resilience Center, among other institutions, outlines the potential for a "threshold" that, if crossed, would lead to runaway warming patterns and the advent of a "Hothouse Earth." If such a threshold is crossed, the study warns, global average temperatures could climb as much as 8 degrees Fahrenheit above current temperatures and sea levels could rise 30 to 200 feet. "Crossing...

We explore the risk that self-reinforcing feedbacks could push the Earth System toward a planetary threshold that, if crossed, could prevent stabilization of the climate at intermediate temperature rises and cause continued warming on a “Hothouse Earth” pathway even as human emissions are reduced. Crossing the threshold would lead to a much higher global average temperature than any interglacial in the past 1.2 million years and to sea levels significantly higher than at any time in the Holocene. We examine the evidence that such a threshold might exist and where it might be. If the threshold is crossed, the resulting...

Global warming fanatics have been wrong on EVERY MAJOR PREDICTION of devastation since 2008. Now the George Soros-funded Media Matters activist group is pushing Facebook to eliminate platforms that question global warming.

At the center of the table in a modest, high-rise apartment in the teeming city of Shenzhen, China, a simmering pot of soup stock was surrounded by large platters featuring mushrooms, different kinds of thinly shaved meat, lettuce, potato, cauliflower, eggs, and shrimp. Folding his hands together, Jian Zhang, a onetime rural farmer who now works as an employee for a small consulting firm in the city, asked his fellow diners to give thanks for the meal — the likes of which he could have only dreamed of when growing up in a remote village in the Jiangxi province. The...

EUROPE is braced for its hottest day since records began today with temperatures likely to soar above the 118F high set 40 years ago. Thousands of Brit holidaymakers and expats in Spain and Portugal will pile on to packed beaches as the heatwave peaks. The blistering sunshine is widely tipped to pass the 118.4F (48C) recorded in Athens, Greece, on July 10, 1977. And the deadly scorcher — driven by an African plume carrying Saharan dust with it — will spark a mini-revival of Britain’s heatwave with temperatures of 88F (31C) expected all weekend. But it could also lead to...

When Charlotte Adelman was a student at the University of Chicago, the nearby parks became a refuge for her, a sprawling expanse of green where she could escape the concrete urban landscape. It was then, many decades ago, that Adelman began her journey to becoming a fighter for environmental justice. Along the way, she has fought to preserve open spaces, ban pesticides in Wilmette and co-authored a book, “Prairie Directory of North America.” Now, Adelman, 81, has set her sights on her biggest target yet — to block the Obama Presidential Center from being built in Jackson Park. Adelman, along...

Late last summer, and with great fanfare, Xcel Energy announced its proposal to close the Comanche I & II power units in Pueblo a decade ahead of schedule. They offered as replacement the euphemistically titled “Colorado Energy Plan” , a massive $2.5 billion fuel-switching scheme to move its Colorado customers away from baseload, reliable hydrocarbons in favor of intermittent renewables. ... the Minneapolis-based monopoly utility will force captive ratepayers to cough up at least another $287 million. That’s on top of the modeling errors we already found in their accounting, and Xcel acknowledged. In other words, ratepayers will pay higher...

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has closed an investigation into oil giant Exxon Mobil Corp. without taking any action. The probe was opened in 2016 to examine how Exxon Mobil accounts for its oil and natural gas reserves and factors the costs of climate change into its operations, including whether it is truthful enough with shareholders about the financial risks of climate change and climate policies. Exxon Mobil provided a letter from the SEC Friday saying that the investigation had been closed with no action, but that such a notification was not an exoneration. The SEC doesn’t comment publicly...

Much of the heat that’s gripped California and hastened the spread of deadly wildfires recently is due to a strange but familiar shift in the jet stream — one that’s haunted the West with threatening fire conditions in the past and could cause more hot, dry spells in the future, especially with a changing climate. The jet stream, the river of wind high above the Northern Hemisphere, has been weaker and wavier in the past few weeks, scientists say. Instead of pushing weather systems along as it usually does, it’s allowing the patterns to stagnate. “We’re seeing this mix of...

The nine-banded armadillo is quietly expanding its range out of the southeastern United States, invading regions once too cold for the small mammal to survive. Scientists monitoring the armadillo's progress say the migration is a consequence of rising global temperatures. And it's a sign of more to come. "Armadillos are a pretty good climate change indicator species," said John MacGregor, a herpetologist at the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife. "When things that don't tolerate cold climates are suddenly appearing in a cold area, it tells me that area is getting warmer." Areas that once experienced bitterly cold winters, like...

The New York Times Magazine has done something unprecedented. On Wednesday, it released an entire issue containing just one article on the subject of global warming. “Losing Earth,” by Nathaniel Rich, chronicles the ten-year period from 1979 to 1989 in which scientists reached consensus about human-caused climate change, and politicians nearly came to a global-scale solution. Informed by more than 100 interviews and 18 months of reporting, the piece twists and turns around a zany cast of characters who bravely risked their careers to solve the climate crisis. There’s no spoiler alert needed for the ending: They failed. But it’s...

Citing safety, the Trump administration on Thursday proposed rolling back car-mileage standards, backing away from years of government efforts to cut Americans’ trips to the gas station and reduce unhealthy, climate-changing tailpipe emissions. If the proposed rule becomes final, it could roil the auto industry as it prepares for new model years and weaken one of the federal government’s chief weapons against climate change — regulating emissions from cars and other vehicles. The result, opponents say, will be dirtier air and more pollution-related illness and death. The proposal itself estimates it could cost tens of thousands of jobs — auto...