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Nearly five years after it hit bestseller lists, a book that purported to be a six-year-old boy's story of visiting angels and heaven after suffering a bad car crash is being pulled from shelves. The young man at the center of The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven, Alex Malarkey, said this week that the story was all made up. "I did not die. I did not go to Heaven," Alex Malarkey wrote. He continued, "I said I went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention. When I made the claims that I did, I had never...

The world’s oceans are now rising far faster than they did in the past, a new study says. The study found that for much of the 20th century — until about 1990 — sea level was about 30 percent less than earlier research had figured. But that’s not good news, scientists say, because about 25 years ago the seas started rising faster and the acceleration in 1990 turns out to be more dramatic than previously calculated.

The world's oceans are now rising far faster than they did in the past, a new $tudy says. The current sea level rise rate — which started in 1990 — is 2.5 times faster than it was from 1900 to 1990, according to a $tudy published Wednesday in the journal Nature. Scientists say that faster pace of sea level rise is from melting ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica and shrinking glaciers, triggered by man-made global warming. "We're seeing a significant acceleration in the past few decades," said $tudy lead author Carling Hay, a geophysical researcher at Harvard University....

Although most of us worry about other things, climate scientists have become increasingly worried about the survival of civilization. For example, Lonnie Thompson, who received the U.S. National Medal of Science in 2010, said that virtually all climatologists "are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization." Informed journalists share this concern. The climate crisis "threatens the survival of our civilization," said Pulitzer Prize-winner Ross Gelbspan. Mark Hertsgaard agrees, saying that the continuation of global warming "would create planetary conditions all but certain to end civilization as we know it." These scientists and journalists, moreover,...

FULL TITLE: Volcanoes are cooling Earth: Aerosols from small eruptions have reduced global temperatures and tropical rainfall. Small volcanic eruptions over the past 20 years have been protecting the Earth from global warming, according to a new study. Scientists have confirmed that droplets of sulphur-rich aerosols spewed into the upper atmosphere by volcanoes have been reflecting sunlight away from the Earth. Until recently it was thought that only particularly large eruptions had any noticeable affect on the climate. This could have helped decrease the global temperatures by between 0.05°C to 0.12°C over the past 15 years. Since 1998, the warmest...

The latest research on little auks, sometimes called "penguins of the north," reveals a surprising response to a rapidly warming Arctic: The birds make up for food lost to the effects of climate change by catching prey that were stunned by the cold water running off melting glaciers—another effect of climate change. The study, published Monday in the journal Global Change Biology, is the first to examine the feeding habits of little auks as Arctic ice is lost. Scientists watched the birds in Franz-Josef Land, off the northern coast of Russia, during an expedition supported by the National Geographic Society....

The economic damage caused by a ton of carbon dioxide emissions – often referred to as the "social cost" of carbon – could actually be six times higher than the value that the United States now uses to guide current energy regulations, and possibly future mitigation policies, Stanford scientists say. A recent U.S. government study concluded, based on the results of three widely used economic impact models, that an additional ton of carbon dioxide emitted in 2015 would cause $37 worth of economic damages. These damages are expected to take various forms, including decreased agricultural yields, harm to human health...

In a global warming series Eco Eye, experts warned about the catastrophic dangers of climate change, predicting significant coastal damage and the extinction of many plant and animal species. “Climate change is a reality. It’s here. That’s something as a society we haven’t bought into. It will be a very difficult problem for Dublin, Cork, Galway and Belfast,” said Professor Robert Devoy. “What is coming down the tracks is a significant warming of the planet. The last time it warmed of this order, 88 per cent of life on earth disappeared. “I have five grandchildren. Whatever time is left to...

Co-authored James Doogue and JoNovaEmpirical data withheld by key scientists shows that since 1910 ocean pH levels have not decreased in our oceans as carbon dioxide levels increased. Overall the trend is messy but more up than down, becoming less acidic. So much for those terrifying oceans of acid that were coming our way.What happened to those graphs? Scientists have had pH meters and measurements of the oceans for one hundred years. But experts decided that computer simulations in 2014 were better at measuring the pH in 1910 than the pH meters were. The red line (below) is the models...

Climate change predictions can be scary, and political opposition to climate action is fierce. But EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy says she can’t help but be optimistic about the future. McCarthy, speaking at the American Meteorological Society (AMS) annual meeting in Phoenix on Wednesday, struck a decidedly positive tone. “If there is ever a challenge where the U.S. can shine and provide leadership, it is the challenge of climate change,” she said. “The real danger and the real economic problem we face is not taking action,” McCarthy said. She emphasized the importance of the work of the thousands of weather and...

Environmentalism: Re-upping on delusional climate-change fantasies, "Governor Moonbeam" asked in his inauguration speech Monday for the Golden State to meet half its energy needs with renewable energy by 2030. Gov. Jerry Brown, who leads the state that hosted Solyndra, embraces bird-chopping wind turbines and builds crispy critter-producing solar panel farms, is a leading advocate of renewable energy and environmental protection. As pollution from coal-fired plants and industries in China wafted across the Pacific, he took a deep breath at his fourth inauguration as the state's chief executive and doubled down on green energy's failed promise by tasking California to fight...

Forty years after first taking the oath as governor of California, Democrat Jerry Brown was sworn in to an historic fourth term Monday, proposing sweeping changes to address global climate change while offering a measured approach to targeting the state’s long-term financial liabilities. Brown said he would push to reduce petroleum use in cars by up to 50 percent; increase from a third to a half the required proportion of electricity produced from renewable energy sources and make heating fuels cleaner – all within 15 years.

How the Earth is getting both colder and warmer at the same time defies reality, but that is of little concern to Dr. Holdren As January 2014 arrived with a blast of cold air ominously dubbed the “polar vortex”, the White House released a video in which the Chief Science Advisor to President Obama, Dr. John Holdren, managed to get on both sides of it, declaring the “extreme cold” to be “a pattern that we expect to see with increasing frequency as global warming continues.” How the Earth is getting both colder and warmer at the same time defies reality,...

**SNIP** The Obama administration continued its attack on coal-fired power plants, which provide about 40 percent of US electricity. In June, the EPA proposed new restrictions on carbon emissions that would make it vitually impossible to build a new coal-fired plant in the US. At the same time, more than 1,200 new coal-fired plants are planned across the world, with two-thirds to be built in India and China. In his 2007 Noble Prize acceptance speech, former Vice President Al Gore warned that the arctic ice could be gone in “as little as seven years.” But arctic sea ice rebounded in...

A hacking threat against CNN that rose to the FBI attention is actually a hoax, claims a freelance writer from Tennessee who is claiming responsibility for the post. David Garrett Jr., from Nashville, says he we the one who posted to the anonymous site ´pastebin´ claiming to be Sony hackers the ´Guardians of Peace.´ It included the bizarre demand that CNN should turn over anchor Wolf Blitzer. It is believed that the FBI issued a Joint Intelligence Bulletin based on that post that warned CNN and other media companies that hack attacks could be in the works.

Fifteen months ago, academic climate scientists expressed worries that a new climate model sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) was going to harm existing modeling efforts, siphoning off talent and funding when federally funded science is short on both. The biggest concern: that the Accelerated Climate Modeling for Energy (ACME) project, meant to forecast local impacts of climate change and to be used on DOE’s future exascale supercomputers, would dilute resources from the Community Earth System Model (CESM). That model, managed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, is built on science and code...

You know the Catholic Church is in trouble when the left-wing Guardian refers to Francis as the “superman pope.” He didn’t earn this dubious honor just by brokering Obama’s embrace of the communist slave state in Cuba. He has promoted state-inflicted poverty by attacking economic freedom and is now pushing the global warming hoax: In 2015, the pope will issue a lengthy message on the subject to the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics, give an address to the UN general assembly and call a summit of the world’s main religions. The reason for such frenetic activity, says Bishop Marcelo Sorondo, chancellor...

Following a visit in March to Tacloban, the Philippine city devastated in 2012 by typhoon Haiyan, the pope will publish a rare encyclical on climate change and human ecology. Urging all Catholics to take action on moral and scientific grounds, the document will be sent to the world’s 5,000 Catholic bishops and 400,000 priests, who will distribute it to parishioners.

... There were many AGU talks about the climate impacts we’re already seeing. For example, human-caused global warming is amplifying many types of extreme weather like drought, heat waves, and storms. Climate and social scientists have struggled to communicate this urgency to the public. While most people accept that humans are changing the climate, few understand the urgency of mitigating these risks. This is particularly a problem for ideological conservatives. Among social scientists, a consensus is forming that more climate-specific knowledge translates into greater acceptance of the science and support for mitigation. However, facts are more effective when ideological barriers...

Man-made global warming is saving the Earth from “another ice age,” White House Science Advisor Eric Holdren says in a new video promoting man-made global warming theory: “We know beyond any reasonable doubt that humans are the main cause of the warming of the earth’s climate that has been measured over the past few decades. The warming is unequivocal. “While the climate of the earth has changed over the millennia as a result of natural factors – principally changes in the tilt and orientation of the earth’s axis and rotation, and in the shape of its orbit around the sun...