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GENEVA - The U.N. weather agency is warning of "fundamental change" afoot in the global climate and continued warming, accompanied recently by unusually high rainfall in parts of the US and Europe. The World Meteorological Organization was pointing Tuesday to data released by NASA a day earlier showing that this May was the hottest on record, and the Northern Hemisphere spring has been the hottest spring ever.

The Paris floods, that saw extreme rainfall swell the river Seine to its highest level in decades, were made almost twice as likely because of the manmade emissions driving global warming, scientists have found. As artworks in the Louvre were moved to safety and Paris's cobbled walkways were submerged, the French president, Francois Hollande, blamed the floods on climate change. Now a preliminary analysis by a group of scientists, including the Dutch weather agency and the University of Oxford, has concluded the risk of the flooding event in Paris was almost doubled - multiplied by a factor of 1.8 -...

Currently, about 40% of Americans support Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, and about 40% of Americans are not worried about global warming. While short of a majority, this is a substantial fraction of the American public failing to grasp the risks associated with a Donald Trump presidency and potentially catastrophic climate change impacts. The threat of catastrophic climate change isn't as tangible as a burning house, car accident, or lung cancer. Americans tend to view climate threats as distant in both time and space. We can only hope that the fraction of Americans failing to grasp the immense...

So my colleague and I were catching up after not seeing each other for a while. She’s just accepted a new position as an administrator at the community college up the street from where I work. I wanted to welcome her to the neighborhood and her new job. We arranged to meet at a Starbucks in between our two institutions on Capitol Hill in Seattle. We talked for maybe 30 or 40 minutes. It’s the kind of innocuous catch-up talk that two college administrators do when we’re trying to figure out what we’ve been up to since we last talked....

Former GE CEO Jack Welch said Thursday the Obama administration's heavy focus on combating climate change is "radical behavior" that's holding back the economy. "You get a reduced military," Welch said. "You get an economy that won't move. You get ozone regs that are wacky."

The devastating rise in Alaska's wildfires is making global warming even worse than scientists expected, US government researchers said on Wednesday. The sharp spike in Alaska's wildfires, where more than 5 million acres burned last year, are destroying a main buffer against climate change: the carbon-rich boreal forests, tundra and permafrost that have served as an enormous carbon sink. Northern wildfires must now be recognised as a significant driver of climate change - and not just a side-effect, according to the report from the US Geological Survey. The USGS warned last year that Alaska could lose about a quarter of...

The 10-question quiz included questions about prostitution, drugs, drive-by shootings and spray paint graffiti. According to WALA, one of the questions was: Leroy has 2 ounces of cocaine. If he sells an eight ball to Antonio for $320 and 2 grams to Juan for $85 per gram, what is the street value of the rest of his hold?" It was similar to a math quiz that's been on the internet for years with questions about gangs.

On Saturday a four-year old boy fell into a gorilla enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo. Sadly the gorilla, named Harambe, was shot and killed by zoo officials to save the life of the child, sparking outrage on social media. The most ludicrous of the objections came from those who actually believed the gorilla was killed because of racism. Conservative author and commentator Mark Dice uncovered some of the most outrageous tweets, including a slew that referred to the child as a “white boy” and one that called the killing an act of “white privilege.” As Dice pointed out in his...

There's no putting a chill on the worldwide air conditioning boom that's expected to heat up to historic levels over the next decade. Nations with emerging economies and spiking populations - including India, Indonesia and Brazil - are seeing air conditioner sales grow 10 to 15 percent a year. That means the world's supply of A/C units could nearly double from about 900,000 million in 2015 to roughly 1.6 million by 2030, according to a recent Berkeley National Laboratory study. So instead of simply trying to shut off the inexorable growth, scientists are working to find fresh energy-efficient technologies that...

here are an awful lot of people who ended up with egg on their face late Monday. The Daily Mail revealed Facebook photos of the couple who they reported as the parents of the inquisitive little four-year-old boy who fell into the gorilla habitat Saturday, resulting in the shooting death of the gorilla in order to save the life of the child. This happened at the Cincinnati Zoo, and one of the zoo-goers captured heart-pounding video of the boy’s life-and-death struggle with the gorilla. Liberals and Black Lives Matter activists took to social media to call the shooting of the...

The latest auction in California's cap-and-trade market for greenhouse gases fell sharply below expectations, as buyers purchased just 2% of the carbon credits whose sale funds a variety of state programs -- notably, the proposed high-speed rail project. The quarterly auction, conducted May 18 and announced Wednesday, will provide just $10 million for state programs, including $2.5 million for the bullet train. The rail authority had been expecting about $150 million. Whatever prompted the lack of buyers, the auction is a stark example of the uncertainty and risk of relying on actively-traded carbon credits to build the bullet train. The...

When a young Inuit hunter took aim with his rifle he thought he had spotted a polar bear or an Arctic fox in northern Canada. But the photographs of his kill posted on social media by Didji Ishalook, 25, have sparked feverish interest among scientists and a fascinated public. "They're saying it's a grizzly-polar bear hybrid," he said. Mr Ishalook had actually shot a rare cross between the two species, who normally live in very different climates. Determining whether it is a grolar or a prizzly will have to wait for the results of DNA testing. But its existence adds...

Swift Justice? Apparently Virginia Governor Terry McAwful has already been booked by the Virginia Department of Corrections according to WMAL’s Chris Plante’s Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ChrisPlanteShow/

Study forecasts global temperature increases of up to 9.5 degrees C. The unmitigated burning of Earth's remaining fossil fuels would cause global warming on a scale bigger than previously anticipated, according to a new study out of the University of Victoria. Katarzyna Tokarska, a PhD student at the university, is the lead author of a new paper titled "The climate response to five trillion tonnes of carbon". Previous modelling, including those used by the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, use projections that assume just two trillion tonnes of carbon would be released.

Donald Trump has said he doesn't believe in man-made climate change and has called global warming a "hoax," but he's trying to protect a golf course he owns on the coast of Ireland from its effects. The presumptive GOP nominee applied for a permit to build a seawall next to Trump International Golf Links & Hotel Ireland in County Clare to prevent erosion, according to Politico. His application included an environmental impact statement that explicitly mentions "global warming and its effects." According to Politico's report, that statement says that rising sea levels in that region could accelerate erosion. The statement...

Before he died May 4 from complications stemming from pancreatic cancer and a stroke, former GOP Sen. Bob Bennett of Utah asked his wife, Joyce, and son, Jim, if there were any Muslims in his hospital. If so, he wanted to "go up to every single one of them to thank them for being in this country, and apologize to them on behalf of the Republican Party for Donald Trump." Joyce and Jim Bennett shared this story with The Daily Beast, as well as other tales involving his disgust with "Donald Trump's xenophobia" and proposal to ban Muslims from...

New evidence shows that a University of Virginia student who alleged that she was gang raped at a campus fraternity created the fake persona of the alleged ringleader of the attack, according to lawyers representing a U-Va. official who is suing Rolling Stone magazine for defamation.

Thursday afternoon at approximately 4:57pm ET , North Carolina Police detained a man, later to be identified as Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo, for using the men’s restroom in the Charlotte-Douglas International Airport. Police say they received a complaint from numerous bystanders and patrons inside the bathroom complaining of a person who didn’t belong there. When asked how police recognized that the man who they received complaints about may have been a women, they pointed towards the Cowboys apparel Romo was wearing at the time. “It was a dead giveaway,” said officer Mike Roseman. Under the state law, Romo was...

The laid back and trendy college town of Iowa City was plunged into turmoil a little over two weeks ago, after a black University of Iowa freshman claimed that three white men had viciously attacked him in the downtown and called him a racial slur. A media firestorm ensued, with the first report airing on a Chicago news station. Iowa City police quickly declared they were investigating a possible hate crime and even consulted with the FBI. City and university officials were on the defensive. Social justice warriors held protests. The hate crime, however, turned out to be a hoax...

Donald Trump will have a climate plan and it will be ugly. For now, the Republican frontrunner is pedaling the kind of denialism his party loves, having called global warming everything from a "hoax" to a "con job" to a Chinese plot. But an interview with his energy adviser hinted that Trump might endeavor to Make Atmospheric Carbon Levels Great Again. "My advice would be, while I'm a skeptic as well", Trump energy honcho Kevin Cramer [said], "he is a product of political populism, and political populism believes that there needs [to be] some addressing of climate change". Cramer has...