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A rapidly spreading invasive pest now threatens crops across the continent. The fall armyworm is closely related to the African armyworm, which is native to the continent. Both pests feed not just on corn, but also on other cereal crops like rice, sorghum, and wheat. Kenneth Wilson of Lancaster University has studied the African armyworm for 25 years and is now part of a working group with the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization that is examining how to deal with the newly arrived pest. The fall armyworm comes at a time when farmers throughout rural Africa are grappling with...

The grownups have finally won and everyone in the UK, from those in cold homes to those on polluted streets and in flooded towns, will benefit. The most important aspect of the UK government’s new clean growth strategy is its unequivocal statement that tackling climate change and a prosperous economy are one and the same thing. There is no long-term, high-carbon economic strategy because the impacts of unchecked climate change destroy economies, as Lord Nicholas Stern puts it. But the Conservative party has long been swinging between the green dream and fossil-fuelled fantasies. Recent years have seen one green policy...

Big deadly fires are nothing new to California, particularly during fire season when the Santa Ana or Diablo winds blow hot and dry, making tinder out of trees and bushes that have been baking all summer long. But the firestorm now raging through Northern California isn’t the typical wildfire. We don’t yet know what started the fires in Northern California, but we have a good idea of what made them so destructive. Authorities blame a combination of factors. Burning fossil fuels is not the only human activity that contributes to the destruction wrought by wildfires and hurricanes. So does the...

SACRAMENTO (CBS SF) — California Gov. Jerry Brown warns that catastrophic wildfires will keep ripping through the state as the climate warms. **SNIP** He said a warming climate has contributed to catastrophic wildfires. “That’s the way it is with a warming climate, dry weather and reducing moisture.” said Brown. “These kind of catastrophes have happened and they’ll continue to happen, and we have to be prepared to do everything we can to mitigate.” The governor has positioned himself as a leader in the fight against climate change.

A new statistical tool for modeling large climate and environmental datasets that has broad applications—from weather forecasting to flood warning and irrigation management—has been developed by researchers at KAUST. Ying Sun and her PhD student Huang Huang developed a new method that uses a hierarchical low-rank approximation scheme to resolve the computational burden, providing an efficient tool for fitting Gaussian process models to datasets that contain large quantities of climate and environmental measurements. The model was applied to a spatial dataset of two million soil-moisture measurements from the Mississippi River basin in the United States. They were able to fit...

The International Monetary Fund has warned the world’s richest nations to have a greater sense of urgency about climate change. The IMF’s latest World Economic Outlook (WEO), released overnight, has dedicated an entire chapter to the impact of weather shocks and climate change on global economic activity. It warns coping with climate change will be one of the “fundamental challenges” of the 21st century, saying richer countries must help low-income economies adapt to rapidly increasing temperatures. “Climate change is a negative global externality of potentially catastrophic proportions and only collective action and multilateral cooperation can effectively address its causes and...

The Midwest is safe from hurricanes and drought-driven wildfires. But that does not mean the region and its roads and bridges are free from the threat of climate change, a new study warns. Higher temperatures and unusually heavy rain events in the Midwest spell trouble for transportation and infrastructure systems, according to a study released Tuesday by the Midwest Economic Policy Institute. The group is a division of the Illinois Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank whose members include representatives from the construction industry and labor unions. “Rising temperatures and the likelihood of more storms and flooding reduce the...

It’s been a terrifying season for what we used to call natural disasters. It is tempting to look at this string of disasters and think, Climate change is here. As the journalist Malcolm Harris put it blithely on Twitter, “There didn’t used to be a major natural disaster every single day.” But the truth is actually far scarier than “welcome to the new normal.” The climate system we have been observing since August, the one that has pummeled the planet again and again and exposed even the world’s wealthiest country as unable (or at least unwilling) to properly respond to...

The Trump administration formally proposed on Tuesday to roll back yet another of President Barack Obama’s efforts to position the United States as a global leader in the fight against climate change. The move, though widely anticipated, was deeply disheartening. All this is infuriating on several levels. It repeated the same false narrative that congressional Republicans have been peddling for years and that Mr. Trump’s minions are peddling now — that environmental regulations are job killers, that restraining greenhouse gas emissions will damage the economy, that the way forward lies in digging more coal and punching more holes in the...

After more than two decades of study I am convinced that life here on Earth has been getting better and better for the billions of we people who make this little blue marble our beloved home. The “tons and tons of carbon we are spewing into the atmosphere every day” as Al Gore puts it are actually a good thing. In his rants that the Earth will become uninhabitable former Vice President Gore is referring the carbon dioxide gas being released into the atmosphere as we power our civilization with fossil fuels. However, it turns out that as the...

A lawyer for an environmental activist convicted of targeting an oil pipeline in North Dakota said he doesn't think a judge's decision disallowing the threat of global warming as a defense to justify the crime would be grounds for an appeal. Defendant Michael Foster, of Seattle, said he has not decided whether to appeal his jury conviction to the North Dakota Supreme Court, and part of him wants "to honor the judge and the jury and their verdict." Foster took part in effort on Oct. 11, 2016, to draw attention to climate change by turning off valves on five pipelines...

Someone with the Twitter handle “lexi,” whose Twitter account is now locked down and whose Shift key doesn’t seem to work, sent out the graphic below with the following caption: this letter was anonymously sent by a parent to the daycare center i work at. it’s hard to believe people like this actually exist. Check out the joker font, no doubt used for extra realism: ***IMAGE ON LINK*** Welcome to the Hate Hoax List, Lexi. I mean lexi.

The arrival of record-shattering hurricanes, forest fires in the West the size of Maryland, and collapsing glaciers makes something clear to anyone not in a state of ideological denial: Humanity is in a fight for its survival, and if we have any hope of saving ourselves from endless climate disasters, we must radically change the political climate first. With no time left to debate the delusional dogmas of climate denialism, we must develop policies to break quickly and permanently from the carbon economy and invest in renewable energy and a far more resilient national infrastructure. It's not too late to...

A lost shoelace at Michigan State University caused a racial uproar Wednesday after someone mistook it for a noose. MSU President Lou Anna K. Simon released a statement Wednesday morning saying she was “distressed” after finding out “a student reported a noose was hung outside of her room.” Simon commended the student’s “courage” for reporting the “racial incident” and put out a clear message. “This type of behavior is not tolerated on our campus,” Simon said. “No Spartan should ever feel targeted based on their race, or other ways in which they identify.” But by Wednesday afternoon, the investigation by...

Global leaders must do more to protect indigenous people fighting to protect their land and way of life if the world is to limit climate change, according to the UN special rapporteur Victoria Tauli-Corpuz. Speaking ahead of key climate talks in Bonn next month she urged politicians to recognise that indigenous communities around the world were the most effective custodians of millions of hectares of forest “which act as the world’s lungs”. “Indigenous people’s rights need to be protected in the best way possible, not just for them but because they are also able to provide solutions to many of...

If you want to do something about global warming, look under your feet. Managed well, soil’s ability to trap carbon dioxide is potentially much greater than previously estimated, according to Stanford researchers who claim the resource could “significantly” offset increasing global emissions. They call for a reversal of federal cutbacks to related research programs to learn more about this valuable resource. “Dirt is not exciting to most people,” said Earth system science professor Rob Jackson, lead author of the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics article. “But it is a no-risk climate solution with big co-benefits. Fostering soil health...

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said on Wednesday he hoped recent devastating hurricanes in the Caribbean and southern United States would convince climate change skeptics like U.S. President Donald Trump that global warming is a “major threat.” Guterres, who will visit the Caribbean islands this weekend to see damage from last month’s hurricanes said the world must be more determined in pushing for ”a clean, sustainable energy future.”“I have not yet lost my hope that what is happening will be making those that are still skeptical about climate change to be more and more realizing that this, indeed, is a...

Climate change may cause nearly three times as much clear-air turbulence as current conditions by the period between 2050 and 2080, according to a study released today. Flights over the north Atlantic may experience as much as 180 percent more severe turbulence, or in-flight bumpiness stronger than gravity and able to shake passengers in a plane’s cabin, according to the study, published in the Geophysical Research Letters journal. Flights over North America may experience an additional 110 percent, and flights over Europe up to 160 percent more. “What air travelers can expect is to be confined to their seat for...

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will propose repealing the Clean Power Plan - the Obama administration’s centerpiece regulation to fight climate change - and plans to solicit input on a rule to replace it, according to an EPA document seen by Reuters. The decision marks the agency’s first formal step to sweep away the rule intended to cut carbon emissions from power plants, after President Donald Trump signed an executive order in March launching the EPA’s review. The Republican president has expressed doubts about the science of climate change and has blamed former Democratic President Barack Obama’s efforts to cut...

Video from taxi cab. Gun flashes at 5 minute mark corresponding with the reports of gun fire. Does this indicate a second shooter?