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A member of student government at Ohio University has been charged with a misdemeanor after she allegedly made false statements to police about receiving threatening messages. Anna Ayers, who is a member of the OU Student Senate, was arrested Monday and charged by the Ohio University Police Department with three separate counts of “making false alarms.” It is alleged that Ayers falsely reported multiple threatening messages, including a “death threat,” which she claims was because of her being a member of the LGBTQ community. “Ayers previously reported receiving a series of threatening messages, two of them in the Student Senate...

The events of the last two years show that Americans know how to choose up sides and fight each other. But if we had to, could we put aside our differences and fight together? We are about to find out. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we are running out of time. This is not a hoax. It is not a theory. It is not a natural cycle of warming and cooling. It is a man-made catastrophe that demands a national effort unlike anything this country has seen since World War II. As in 1941, what’s required now...

As a scientist who’s spent the past decade helping natural-resource managers in federal, state and tribal governments prepare for climate change, I’ve become used to giving terrible news. I thus often find myself feeling like an oncologist delivering a stream of devastating prognoses. Also like an oncologist, I find myself and others scrutinizing my bedside manner: am I being too cold, clinical and detached as I describe an apocalyptic future? As scientists, we are trained to present information clearly and dispassionately to avoid the appearance of bias. Unfortunately, this communication style falls desperately flat when speaking to the public, making...

From low-emission cows to robotic soil management, the farming industry will have to explore new approaches in the wake of a UN warning that the world needs to cut meat consumption or face worsening climate chaos. Cow farts are a major source of greenhouse gas, but researchers – who collect the gases in bags fitted to cows – have found there is considerable natural variation from animal to animal. If the low-emission cows could be bred with each other, this could bring down these emissions, they say. Researchers in other countries are also looking at changing feed to make cattle...

The international panel charged with reining in climate change said this week that the world needs to take "unprecedented" steps to remake its energy, transportation and agriculture systems to avoid the worst effects of global warming. What the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change did not discuss was an even more radical potential response - one that would re-engineer Earth’s stratosphere to create a massive heat shield by effectively duplicating the fallout that follows a volcanic eruption. This kind of revolutionary “solar geoengineering” - known by some as the “Pinatubo Strategy,” after a volcano whose 1991 eruption shrouded the planet in...

Hurricane Michael isn't a truly "natural disaster." Neither was Harvey in Houston. Nor Maria in Puerto Rico. Yet we continue to use that term. Doing so -- especially in the era of climate change -- is misleading if not dangerous, according to several disaster experts and climate scientists I reached by phone and on Twitter. "The phrase 'natural disaster' is an attempt to lay blame where blame really doesn't rest," said Kerry A. Emanuel, a professor of atmospheric science at MIT and a global expert on hurricanes. It's not about semantics, said Ksenia Chmutina, a lecturer at Loughborough University in...

A report by the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food says beef consumption needs to fall by as much as 90% in western countries to combat climate change. The report's lead author, Dr Marco Springmann, told Today that individuals should aim to eat just one portion of beef, pork or lamb a week.

Climate change is bringing the heat for polar bears - and things are not looking good. The latest development? A shift in their diet, which may soon include regular gorging on blubbery whale carcasses, scientists say. And, as Craig Welch reports for National Geographic, humans are to blame. The planet’s rising temperatures are steadily melting northerly sea ice, which Arctic polar bears depend on to access their favorite seal-flavored suppers. During the warmer months, when the ice sheets shatter, some bears simply fast on land, waiting until hunting bridges freeze again. But with each passing year, the number of toasty...

Preventing an extra single degree of heat could make a life-or-death difference in the next few decades for multitudes of people and ecosystems on this fast-warming planet, an international panel of scientists reported Sunday. But they provide little hope the world will rise to the challenge. The Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its gloomy report at a meeting in Incheon, South Korea. In the 728-page document, the U.N. organization detailed how Earth's weather, health and ecosystems would be in better shape if the world's leaders could somehow limit future human-caused warming. Among other things: — Half as...

Investigators now say the woman who accused three Bellevue officers of rape has a history of making false accusations. Bellevue, WA – Prosecutors have dropped the charges against a now-former police officer who served 49 days in jail because of what investigators now say were fake rape allegations.

Anna Ayers, commissioner of the Ohio University Student Senate Appropriations Commission, was arrested by the OU Police Department on Monday and charged with three counts of making false alarms. Ayers — an OU senior studying journalism, a member of The Post Publishing Board and a previous Post columnist — reported that she received three threatening messages, two in the Student Senate office and one at her residence. An OUPD investigation found that Ayers placed the messages herself prior to reporting them. According to a previous Post report, Student Senate held a meeting to address the threats made to Ayers last...

The UK’s obligations in response to this week’s warnings from the UN over global warming will be controversial and politically fraught, taking the country into “uncharted territory” and testing the political consensus on climate change, the its top climate adviser has warned. The government will have to regulate industry and intervene in the market in ways that will prove controversial in parliament, predicted Chris Stark, chief executive of the Committee on Climate Change (CCCP). He said reducing emissions by the amounts needed would “require answers that the market unfettered will not deliver”. Stark said the independence of the CCCP, which...

President Donald Trump cast doubt on a United Nations report that warned that we have just 12 years to curb climate change by suggesting the reports' authors weren't more credible than reports that say the environment is "fabulous." The UN report, which is based on more than 6,000 scientific references from 91 authors across 40 countries, outlines the impacts of global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Trump, who has previously called climate change a "hoax", was speaking on the White House lawn on Tuesday when he said the report "was given to me." "And I want to...

Let's start with the domestic front of the Russia hoax. Sundance at Conservative Tree House has an excellent post up: "President Trump and DAG Rod Rosenstein - "No Collusion", No Immediate Worries..." The overall theme is one that's dear to Sundance's heart: leverage.-snip- There is now a concrete storyline backed by irrefutable evidence: The FBI allowed itself to take political opposition research created by one party to defeat another in an election, treated it like actionable intelligence, presented it to the court as substantiated, and then used it to justify spying on an adviser for the campaign of that party's...

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday turned aside appeals of a 2017 lower court ruling by its newest justice, Brett Kavanaugh, that struck down an environmental rule imposed under former President Barack Obama regulating a potent greenhouse gas linked to climate change. The appeals had been brought by an environmental group and companies that supported the 2015 rule that had limited hydrofluorocarbons, which are used in a variety of products including spray cans and air conditioners. The ruling authored by Kavanaugh was made by a divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of...

Scientists say climate change is getting worse and there could be "life-or-death" consequences for our planet in the next 20 years. The new report from the U.N. predicts that at the current warming rate, millions more people will die from extreme heat by the year 2040. So are there practical ways we can help limit the warming? According to New York Times international climate reporter Somini Sengupta, the answer is yes: * Drive less, try to carpool or use public transit instead. * Buy less clothing, as apparel and footwear industries contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, or buy vintage and...

Human beings might have to cope with an increasing amount of venomous bites, stings, and other brush ups with poison due to climate change. That’s according to a new study, coming at the same time that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report warning that negative impacts from a warming world are coming faster than expected. According to a massive new analysis of poisonous or venomous aquatic animals, dangerous species might become increasingly common in new ranges. Species whose ranges might shift polewards due to warmer water include lionfish, sea snakes, crown-of-thorns starfish and a number of...

President Trump on Monday angrily attacked Democrats and the college professor who accused his Supreme Court nominee of a sex assault — calling the allegations “a hoax” and predicting the opposition party would pay a heavy price in the midterms. “I thought the way they behaved was absolutely atrocious. I have never seen anything like it,” Trump told reporters as he prepared to board Marine One outside the White House, the first leg of a trip to Florida. “I thought that the way they conducted themselves, the way they dealt with a high-level brilliant … going to be a great...

LONDON - Society would have to enact "unprecedented" changes to how it consumes energy, travels and builds to meet a lower global warming target or it risks increases in heat waves, flood-causing storms and the chances of drought in some regions as well as the loss of species, a U.N. report said on Monday. The report is seen as the main scientific guide for government policymakers on how to implement the 2015 Paris Agreement during the Katowice Climate Change Conference in Poland in December. To contain warming at 1.5C, man-made global net carbon dioxide emissions would need to fall by...

President Trump said Monday that he expects a lot of Democratic voters to support Republican candidates in the upcoming midterms because of how the party's lawmakers handled sexual misconduct allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. "The main base of the Democrats have shifted so far left that we’ll end up being Venezuela. This country would end up being Venezuela. I think a lot of Democrats are going to be voting voting Republican on Nov. 6," Trump told reporters at the White House before departing for a law enforcement event in Florida. The president seized on the specter raised by...