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A draft United Nations climate science report contains dire news about the warming of the planet, suggesting it will likely cross the key marker of 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, of temperature rise in the 2040s, and that this will be exceedingly difficult to avoid. Temperatures could subsequently cool down if carbon dioxide is somehow removed from the air later in the century, the document notes. But that prospect is questionable at the massive scales that would be required, it observes. The 31-page draft, a summary of a much-anticipated report on the 1.5 degrees Celsius target expected to...

Frigid iguanas in Florida. Snowball fights on North Carolina’s beaches. Recent winters have delivered a bitter chill to the Southeast, reinforcing attitudes among some that global warming is a fraud. But according to a scientific study published this month, the Southeast’s colder winter weather is part of an isolated trend, linked to a more wavy pattern in the jet stream that crosses North America. That dipping jet stream allows artic air to plunge into the Southeast. Scientists call this colder weather a “hole” in overall global warming, or a “warming hole.” “What we are looking at is an anomaly,” said...

Hummus, the beloved Middle Eastern dip, is in danger. Chickpeas are going the way of the cheetah. For rather different reasons, both plant and cat are suffering from genetic bottlenecks that reduce their ability to cope with change. And in a warming world, change is happening. In contrast to the cheetah, the domestic chickpea could still be saved by crossing with wild breeds that still exist, to restore lost genetic diversity, wrote Eric Bishop von Wettberg, a plant biologist at the University of Vermont, and others in Nature on Tuesday. ake an example from people: Those with darker skin are...

Melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are speeding up the already fast pace of sea level rise, new satellite research shows. At the current rate, the world's oceans on average will be at least 2 feet - - 61 centimeters - - higher by the end of the century compared to today, according to researchers who published in Monday's Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences. The research, based on 25 years of satellite data, shows that pace has quickened, mainly from the melting of massive ice sheets. It confirms scientists' computer simulations and is in line with predictions...

On Oct. 11, 2016, Michael Foster and two companions rose before dawn, left their budget hotel in Grand Forks, N.D., and drove a white rental sedan toward the Canadian border, diligently minding the speed limit. As the driver, Sam Jessup, and a documentary filmmaker, Deia Schlosberg, recorded events from the back seat. For months, he’d imagined his next actions: He would snip the padlock that secured the gate and approach the blunt length of vertical pipe in the center of the enclosure — the stem of a shut-off valve for the 2,700-mile-long Keystone Pipeline. What neither the sheriff’s department nor...

Many of America’s leading television networks did a poor job of covering climate change last year, even as the newly minted Trump administration worked to unravel regulations meant to tackle the phenomenon and the U.S. was pummeled by a series of record-breaking natural disasters, according to a new report. The group Media Matters for America analyzed climate change coverage on major broadcasters’ nightly news programs and Sunday morning political shows - including those on ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox News and PBS - over the course of 2017. While a total of 260 minutes were devoted to climate change during the...

A small team of researchers from The University of Melbourne, the Georg Eckert Institute and Freie Universität has found problems with research related to assessing the propensity for war amid environmental changes due to global warming. In their paper published in the journal Nature Climate Change, the group argues that much of current research on the topic suffers from several bias flaws. Cullen Hendrix with the University of Denver outlines the arguments by the research team in the same journal issue and suggests future research efforts will have to be refocused if they are to be useful in predicting future...

First they tried suing the utility companies. Then they tried suing the automakers. They even tried suing oil companies on behalf of an Alaskan village in danger of being inundated by oil-fueled rising sea levels. Each approach ended when courts said that the judiciary branch wasn’t the right place to address human-induced global warming, a problem so big it requires a coordinated international response that only legislators can implement. Now private plaintiff lawyers and their allies in government are trying a new strategy: Suing under state-law theories of public nuisance. San Francisco and several other California cities and counties have...

Global warming has the power to curtail one of nature's most powerful phenomena, cutting the chance of lightning strikes in the future. Increasing greenhouse gases could have a significant effect on storm clouds, experts say. Under worst case climate change scenarios temperatures worldwide could increase by 5°C (9°F) by 2100. Using a new method, researchers calculate that the likely incidence of lightning flashes from storm clouds will drop by 15 per cent under these conditions. Dr Declan Finney of the University of Leeds, who was part of the research, told MailOnline: 'In previous studies of the impact of climate change...

Climate change is threatening crop yields worldwide, yet little is known about how global warming will confuse normal plant physiology. Researchers in the UK now show that higher temperatures accelerate seed dispersal in crop species belonging to the cabbage and mustard plant family, limiting reproductive success, and this effect is mediated by a gene called INDEHISCENT. The findings appear February 12 in the journal Molecular Plant. "In many crops, such as oilseed rape, premature seed dispersal is one of the major causes of crop loss. In the context of climate change, this could become increasingly severe," says co-senior author Vinod...

The Open Championship celebrated its 146th edition last summer at Royal Birkdale. The rotation of 10 different courses has been mostly the same for the last few decades, but a recent report noted that the event might not make it 146 more tournaments with the current venues. According to the BBC, which reviewed a report by the Climate Coalition, various courses on the coasts of the UK are in peril because of climate change and a rising North Sea. To its credit, the R&A is taking this future seriously. "It [climate change] is certainly becoming a factor" Steve Isaac, Director...

Just a few years ago, the conventional wisdom held that you couldn’t attribute any single extreme weather event to climate change. But now scientists increasingly can and do state the odds that human actions caused or exacerbated specific droughts and hurricanes. One big reason for the change is that the science of climate modeling is becoming increasingly powerful as improvements in technology, techniques, and data sharing allow researchers to set up novel experiments or simply run many more of them. Climate models are sophisticated computer simulations that approximate how the planet responds to various forces, like surges in carbon dioxide....

It looks like Tom Brady will be attending the OTAs after all. The Kirk & Callahan show uncovered that the source for the Boston Herald's story "Tom Brady wants to get paid like Jimmy G, or he’ll skip OTAs" was a product of a hoax. Kirk Minihane, Gerry Callahan and Mike Mutnansky revealed Friday morning that a texter "Nick in Boston" was pretending to be Tom Brady's agent Don Yee when texting Boston Herald columnist Ron Borges. The texts informed Borges that Brady was intent on sitting out the Patriots' preseason workouts unless he was compensated like his former backup,...

... Climate change isn’t just about the planet. It’s about justice: racial, social, socioeconomic, reproductive, and environmental. It’s about immigration reform, LGBTQIA+ rights, and religious freedom. I know this interconnectedness, and fervently believed in it when I wrote my initial essay submission last year. However, in this moment, I find myself unable to think of climate change on its own. When Trump’s policy is climate destruction, it doesn’t take place in silos. If anything has changed in my mind since last year, it is that my connection to so many struggles for social justice are even more strongly at the...

CINCINNATI -- In national news, there hasn't been much lately for those concerned about the environment to cheer about. The Trump administration appears determined to roll back regulations on coal-fired power plants, offshore oil drilling and coal mining. Locally, however, the city of Cincinnati and Hamilton County government are treating global warming as a real thing -- a thing they can do something about. With input from Hamilton County government, Cincinnati is updating the Green Cincinnati Plan, a set of recommendations for addressing global climate change and for powering the city with 100 percent renewable energy. The city is paying...

A new Harvard University climate action plan, announced by Harvard President Drew Faust today, clears an ambitious path forward to shift campus operations further away from fossil fuels. The plan includes two significant science-based targets to reduce emissions dramatically: a long-term goal to be fossil-fuel-free by 2050, and a short-term one to be fossil-fuel-neutral by 2026. The plan builds on Harvard’s previous 10-year climate goal, achieved in 2016, to reduce on-campus greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent, despite a square footage increase of 12 percent during that period. Following this milestone, Faust appointed a climate change task force composed of...

Slash CEO income, bring more women on board and go low carbon, Church Investors Group tells companies. The Church Investors Group has warned some of Britain’s biggest companies it intends to take a hard line on executive pay, gender diversity and climate change over the forthcoming annual meeting season. The group, which represents church organisations with combined investment assets of about £17bn, has told companies listed on the FTSE 350 index it will refuse to re-elect directors at firms failing to make sufficient progress in key areas. “The best companies contribute to the common good through their products and services...

The political fight over global warming has extended to science education in recent years as several states have attempted to weaken or block new teaching standards that included information about climate science. But only in Idaho has the state legislature stripped all mentions of human-caused climate change from statewide science guidelines while leaving the rest of the standards intact. Now teachers, parents and students are pushing back, hoping to convince the Republican-controlled Idaho Legislature to approve revised standards, which science proponents say are watered down but would still represent a victory for climate change education in the state. The Idaho...

Warmer temperatures and declining snow are making it tougher to host the games. It’s no surprise for climate researchers that training for the Winter Olympics, and the games themselves, have run into trouble. For sports contests that rely on snow and ice, a warmer global climate is no friend. The same week in January that Women’s Cup races stalled, the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, released a study concluding that climate change is increasingly threatening the viability of the Winter Olympics, held once every four years. The updated study, which includes contributions from Canadian, Austrian, and Chinese researchers, concludes...

The University of Colorado is teaming up with 12 other North American research universities with a common goal: tackling climate change. The University Climate Change Coalition bands together 13 campuses and university systems from the United States, Canada and Mexico to work with their respective communities conquering climate-related challenges. The coalition plans to spearhead local and national action in areas such as climate modeling, regulation and policy solutions and more, CU said. In 2015, the U.S.-based universities of the coalition accounted for nearly a quarter of environmental research done by all U.S. institutions, according to data collected by the National...