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Scientists have found a rapid way of producing magnesite, a mineral which stores carbon dioxide. If this can be developed to an industrial scale, it opens the door to removing CO2 from the atmosphere for long-term storage, thus countering the global warming effect of atmospheric CO2. This work is presented at the Goldschmidt conference in Boston. Project leader, Professor Ian Power (Trent University, Ontario, Canada) said: "Our work shows two things. Firstly, we have explained how and how fast magnesite forms naturally. This is a process which takes hundreds to thousands of years in nature at Earth's surface. The second...

Truth Bomb: Interior Secretary and former Montana congressman Ryan Zinke blasted “environmental terrorist groups” over their mindless lockstep opposition to proper forest management including logging as being a major contributing factor to several massive fires burning up the West. In an op-ed for USA Today, Zinke wrote that there are about 100 wildfires currently burning, mostly across the western United States, and that most of them were largely preventable. He also wrote that he had just returned from the massive Ferguson Fire in California while praising POTUS Donald Trump for quickly declaring portions of the state disaster areas so they...

SEATTLE - A Washington state judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed by young activists who argued the state is violating their rights by failing to protect them from climate change. In his ruling Tuesday, King County Superior Court Judge Michael Scott says the issues in the case are political questions that must be addressed by the legislative and executive branches and cannot be resolved by a court.

Climate change is a massive, complex, globe-spanning issue that affects every facet of our lives. And like most problems at its scale, it’s bound to affect the poor and people of color most significantly. How can we address that in South Florida? This week, the issues are the environment and climate change, vital topics for residents who live at “ground zero” for sea-rise threats. The most at-risk population are poor people. They have the least amount of resources to escape the effects of climate change, by buying products or services to make weathering the changes easier. There is also increasing...

On excessively hot days, there are more likely to be fatal car accidents and food safety problems, and police officers and government food inspectors tend to do less of their duties, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The MIT scientists, who analyzed data from across the United States, suggest that if the climate continues to change, by 2050 -- and in another 50 or so years beyond that -- our world may be less safe than it is today. "The crux of the idea -- which is that weather affects how...

“We think we may have found the answer. Increased circulation in the Southern Ocean allowed carbon dioxide to leak into the atmosphere, working to warm the planet,” said Princeton University’s Professor Daniel Sigman, co-author of the study. For years, researchers have known that growth and sinking of phytoplankton pumps carbon dioxide deep into the ocean, a process often referred to as the ‘biological pump.’ “The biological pump is driven mostly by the low latitude ocean but is undone closer to the poles, where carbon dioxide is vented back to the atmosphere by the rapid exposure of deep waters to the...

A team of researchers from the University of Maryland, the State University of New York and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center has found that new global tree growth over the past 35 years has more than offset global tree cover losses. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes using satellite data to track forest growth and loss over the past 35 years and what they found by doing so. There has been a growing consensus in recent years that because humans cut down so many trees (most particularly in the rainforests) that global tree cover is...

It’s hard for the average citizen to read the news these days and not be worried for the future of the planet. We are told that 13 of the last 16 years have been the warmest on record. We hear that coastal cities such as New York and Atlantic City, as well as nearly all of Florida, are at risk of flooding due to unprecedented sea-level rise. We are told that the wildfires in California and Greece are the worst ever recorded, and that these fires represent a “new normal” because of man-made climate change.But to get a good gauge of...

CALGARY - The United Conservative Party is under fire after a Calgary nomination candidate cast doubt on the legitimacy of climate change in several social media posts. Randy Kerr, who is vying for the UCP nomination to run in the provincial riding of Calgary-Beddington, is a former campaign manager for party leader Jason Kenney. Some of his posts linked to a website with connections to Breitbart News, the far-right U.S. media outlet, which is associated with the so-called alt-right and has been accused of being sympathetic to white nationalism. “My first reaction to that is, so what,” said Kerr, when...

The New York Times has devoted an entire edition of its magazine, some 30,000 words, to a terrifying piece about climate change. With 2C warming – an unlikely best-case scenario at this point, scientists were quoted as saying – the planet faces “long-term disaster”. I was having lunch with friends in Brooklyn on Sunday, in a low-lying area that will be under water when all of this comes to pass and, political analysis aside, all we could focus on was: what on earth are we going to do? More specifically, how to ensure the survival of our children, and should...

Sea level rise 'overblown,' solar energy 'dumb,' conference of climate change deniers, Trump officials hear White House officials join event mocking climate change science and renewable power Thomson Reuters · Posted: Aug 09, 2018 4:01 PM ET | Last Updated: 21 minutes ago Pumping carbon dioxide into the air makes the planet greener; the United Nations puts out fake science about climate change to control the global energy market; and wind and solar energy are simply "dumb." These are among the messages that flowed from the America First Energy Conference in New Orleans this week, hosted by some of the...

NEW ORLEANS - Pumping carbon dioxide into the air makes the planet greener; the United Nations puts out fake science about climate change to control the global energy market; and wind and solar energy are simply “dumb”. These are among the messages that flowed from the America First Energy Conference in New Orleans this week, hosted by some of the country’s most vocal climate change doubters - and attended by a handful of Trump administration officials. The day-long conference reflected the political rise of global warming skeptics in Donald Trump’s America that is occurring despite mounting scientific evidence – including...

To curb the effects of climate change, the Paris Agreement calls for limiting the rising temperature only 2 degrees Celsius, but a new study recommends even less. Scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences studied how the weather may change if humans are able to limit climate change. The study found that by changing the goal from 2 degrees to 1.5 degrees Celsius could prevent extreme precipitation events, such as abnormally high rain or snow that can lead to severe flooding, landslides and debris flows. "As the climate warms, both the mean state and the variability of extreme precipitation are...

This summer of fire and swelter looks a lot like the future that scientists have been warning about in the era of climate change, and it’s revealing in real time how unprepared much of the world remains for life on a hotter planet. The disruptions to everyday life have been far-reaching and devastating. In California, firefighters are racing to control what has become the largest fire in state history. Harvests of staple grains like wheat and corn are expected to dip this year, in some cases sharply, in countries as different as Sweden and El Salvador. In Europe, nuclear power...

CALIFORNIA, THE nation’s most populous state and the world’s fifth-largest economy, is on fire. In a state already known for monster conflagrations, the past month has been unusually destructive. The Mendocino Complex fire north of San Francisco is now officially the largest in California’s history, having burned an area about the size of Los Angeles, and it is just one of the major blazes the state has had to face since last October. As much as the president might prefer to point fingers elsewhere, it is impossible to talk about California’s blazes without considering the role of climate change. Four...

U.S. Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) sent a letter to Bank of the West President and Chief Executive Officer Nandita Bakhshi pushing back on the bank’s decision to no longer conduct business with companies engaged in the exploration and production of coal, oil and natural gas. Bank of the West, headquartered in San Francisco, CA, has 23 branches with dedicated employees who work hard to serve communities and families across Wyoming. In his letter, Barrasso condemned the San Francisco headquarter’s attack on Wyoming’s communities and businesses that depend on fossil fuels for energy security, jobs and economic growth. “This misguided and...

Rather than saving people money in gas costs, cleaning up the air, or dealing with the climate crisis, the Trump administration announced its plan to roll back automobile fuel efficiency standards -- proposing to freeze the policy in a few short years. Since cars and trucks are the largest source of carbon pollution in the United States, the existing regulations are crucial in the effort to stop the climate crisis. Limiting pollution for cars is also important for human health, because dirty air from cars is bad for all of us. We know the public will lose from this rollback....

A tornado, albeit a weak one, touched down in New York City last Thursday, in the College Point neighborhood of Queens. A few days earlier, a stronger tornado was spotted near the town of Douglas, in central Massachusetts. The storms were far from the region in the middle of the country known as Tornado Alley, where the bulk of the nation’s tornadoes occur. In a summer already marked by simmering heat that researchers have linked to global warming, is climate change also making tornadoes more common in places where they once were infrequent? Though individual weather events are distinct from...

Though few realize it, the contents of your refrigerator can have a greater impact on climate change than the car in your garage or the fuel that heats and powers your home. That’s why Nordic nations like mine have set out to prove that the simple act of eating may be our best tool in the fight against climate change, as well as other great global crises like public health and inequality. Globally, food systems account for some 20-30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. So let’s turn our attention to the dinner table, to the school cafeteria, and to the...

Injecting particles into the atmosphere to cool the planet and counter the warming effects of climate change would do nothing to offset the crop damage from rising global temperatures, according to a new analysis by University of California, Berkeley, researchers. By analyzing the past effects of Earth-cooling volcanic eruptions, and the response of crops to changes in sunlight, the team concluded that any improvements in yield from cooler temperatures would be negated by lower productivity due to reduced sunlight. The findings have important implications for our understanding of solar geoengineering, one proposed method for helping humanity manage the impacts of...