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The eco fanatics over at The Associated Press are trying to have their cake and eat it too by screeching “climate change” to explain both freezing and warm weather happening simultaneously around the world. AP’s climate agitprop artist-in-chief Seth Borenstein ran another one of his signature environmentalist specials with a headline that was nothing short of comical: “US in deep freeze while much of the world is extra toasty? Yet again, it’s climate change.” Borenstein must have realized that his headline was contradictory because he tried to explain it away in the first paragraph of his piece: “Much of the...

It was a smell that invoked a memory. Both for Emily Kuchlbauer in North Carolina and Ryan Bomba in Chicago. It was smoke from wildfires, the odor of an increasingly hot and occasionally on-fire world. “It’s been very apocalyptic feeling, because in California the dialogue is like, ‘Oh, it’s normal. This is just what happens on the West Coast,’ but it’s very much not normal here,” Kuchlbauer said. As Earth’s climate continues to change from heat-trapping gases spewed into the air, ever fewer people are out of reach from the billowing and deadly fingers of wildfire smoke, scientists say. Already...

The cause of global warming is showing no signs of slowing as heat-trapping carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere increased to record highs in its annual Spring peak, jumping at one of the fastest rates on record, officials announced Monday. Carbon dioxide levels in the air are now the highest they’ve been in more than 4 million years because of the burning of oil coal and gas. The last time the air had similar amounts was during a less hospitable hothouse Earth before human civilization took root, scientists said. “To me as an atmospheric scientist, that trend is very concerning,” said...

Climate change is making major league sluggers into even hotter hitters, sending an extra 50 or so home runs a year over the fences, a new study found. Hotter, thinner air that allows balls to fly farther contributed a tiny bit to a surge in home runs since 2010, according to a statistical analysis by Dartmouth College scientists published in Friday’s Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. They analyzed 100,000 major league games and more than 200,000 balls put into play in the last few years along with weather conditions, stadiums and other factors. “Global warming is juicing home runs...

DENVER (AP) — Earth’s fever persisted last year, not quite spiking to a record high but still in the top five or six warmest on record, government agencies reported Thursday. But expect record-shattering hot years soon, likely in the next couple years because of “relentless” climate change from the burning of coal, oil and gas, U.S. government scientists said.

SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt (AP) — Men usually outnumber and outrank women negotiators in climate talks, except when it comes to global warming’s thorniest diplomatic issue this year — reparations for climate disasters. The issue of polluting nations paying vulnerable countries is handed over to women, who got the issue on the agenda after 30 years. Whether this year’s climate talks in Egypt succeed or fail mostly will come down to the issue called loss and damage in international negotiations, officials and experts say. It’s an issue that intertwines equity and economics, balancing the needs of those hurt and those who...

The world is getting hotter and more crowded and the two issues are connected, but not quite as much as people might think, experts say. On Tuesday somewhere a baby will be born that will be the globe’s 8 billionth person, according to a projection by the United Nations and other experts. The Earth has warmed almost 0.9°C (1.6°F) since the world hit the 4 billion mark in 1974. Climate and population is a touchy subject for scientists and officials. While more people consuming energy, mostly from the burning of fossil fuels, is warming the planet, the key issue isn’t...

SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt (AP) — Earth’s warming weather and rising seas are getting worse and doing so faster than before, the World Meteorological Organization warned Sunday in a somber note as world leaders started gathering for international climate negotiations. “The latest State of the Global Climate report is a chronicle of climate chaos,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said. “We must answer the planet’s distress signal with action -- ambitious, credible climate action.” In its annual state of the climate report, the United Nations’ weather agency said that sea level rise in the past decade was double what it was...

Extreme weather from climate change triggered hunger in nearly 100 million people and increased heat deaths by 68% in vulnerable populations worldwide as the world’s “fossil fuel addiction” degrades public health each year, doctors reported in a new study. Worldwide the burning of coal, oil, natural gas and biomass forms air pollution that kills 1.2 million people a year, including 11,800 in the United States, according to a report Tuesday in the prestigious medical journal Lancet. “Our health is at the mercy of fossil fuels,” said University College of London health and climate researcher Marina Romanello, executive director of the...

A quick study by two scientists calculates that climate change made Hurricane Ian 10% rainier than it would have been if there were no such thing as global warming. Climate change added at least 10% more rain to Hurricane Ian, a study prepared immediately after the storm shows. Thursday's research, which is not peer-reviewed, compared peak rainfall rates during the real storm to about 20 different computer scenarios of a model with Hurricane Ian's characteristics slamming into the Sunshine State in a world with no human-caused climate change. “The real storm was 10% wetter than the storm that might have...

Hurricane Ian is quickly gaining monstrous strength as it moves over oceans partly heated up by climate change, just like 30 other Atlantic tropical storms since 2017 that became much more powerful in less than a day. As the world warms, this turbo-charging of storms is likely to become even more frequent, scientists say. While climate change doesn’t create Ian and other hurricanes, scientists say that a warming world means an increase in rapidly intensifying storms. Climate change also is making storms slower and wetter, worsening deadly storm surges through sea-level rise, increasing freshwater flooding and expanding the proportion of...

Even if the world somehow manages to limit future warming to the strictest international temperature goal, four Earth-changing climate “tipping points” are still likely to be triggered with a lot more looming as the planet heats more after that, a new study said. An international team of scientists looked at 16 climate tipping points — when a warming side effect is irreversible, self-perpetuating and major — and calculated rough temperature thresholds at which they are triggered. None of them are considered likely at current temperatures, though a few are possible. But with only a few more tenths of a degree...

Zombie ice from the massive Greenland ice sheet will eventually raise global sea level by at least 10 inches (27 centimeters) on its own, according to a study released Monday. Zombie or doomed ice is ice that is still attached to thicker areas of ice, but is no longer getting fed by those larger glaciers. That’s because the parent glaciers are getting less replenishing snow. Meanwhile the doomed ice is melting from climate change, said study co-author William Colgan, a glaciologist at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. “It’s dead ice. It’s just going to melt and disappear from...

Experts are ignoring the worst possible climate change catastrophic scenarios, including collapse of society or the potential extinction of humans, however unlikely, a group of top scientists claim. Eleven scientists from around the world are calling on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s authoritative climate science organization, to do a special science report on “catastrophic climate change” to “bring into focus how much is at stake in a worst-case scenario.” In their perspective piece in Monday’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences they raise the idea of human extinction and worldwide societal collapse in the...

Climate change made the record-smashing deadly 2020 Atlantic hurricane season noticeably wetter, a new study says. And it will likely make this season rainier, too, scientists said. Human-caused climate change made the entire season -- 30 named storms -- drop 5% more rain. During the 14 storms that reached hurricane status the rainfall was 8% heavier, according to the study in Tuesday’s Nature Communications. “It doesn’t sound like a lot, but if you’re near a threshold, a little bit can push you over the top,” said Lawrence Berkeley National Lab climate scientist Michael Wehner, co-author of the paper. “The implication...

Climate change has already made allergy season longer and pollen counts higher, but you ain’t sneezed nothing yet. Climate scientists at the University of Michigan looked at 15 different plant pollens in the United States and used computer simulations to calculate how much worse allergy season will likely get by the year 2100. It’s enough to make allergy sufferers even more red-eyed. As the world warms, allergy season will start weeks earlier and end many days later — and it’ll be worse while it lasts, with pollen levels that could as much as triple in some places, according to a...

The seas lapping against America’s coastlines are rising ever faster and will be 10 to 12 inches higher by the year 2050, with major Eastern cities hit regularly with costly floods even on sunny days, a government report says. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and six other federal agencies issued a 111-page report Tuesday that warns of “significant consequences” from rising seas in the next few decades, with parts of Louisiana and Texas projected to see waters a foot and a half (0.45 meters) higher. However, the worst of the long-term sea level rise from the melting of ice...

The American West’s megadrought deepened so much last year that it is now the driest in at least 1,200 years and is a worst-case climate change scenario playing out live, a new study finds. A dramatic drying in 2021 — about as dry as 2002 and one of the driest years ever recorded for the region — pushed the 22-year drought past the previous record-holder for megadroughts in the late 1500s and shows no signs of easing in the near future, according to a study Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change. The study calculated that 42% of this megadrought...

The United States staggered through a steady onslaught of deadly billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in an extra hot 2021, while the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions last year jumped 6% because of surges in coal and long-haul trucking, putting America further behind its 2030 climate change cutting goal. Three different reports released Monday, though not directly connected, paint a picture of a U.S. in 2021 struggling with global warming and its efforts to curb it. Scientists have long said human-caused climate change makes extreme weather nastier and more frequent, documenting numerous links to wild and deadly weather events. They say...

A white Christmas seems to be slowly morphing from a reliable reality to a dream of snowy holidays past for large swaths of the United States in recent decades. Analysis of 40 years of December 25 U.S. snow measurements shows that less of the country has snow for Christmas than in the 1980s. The numbers are small enough that it’s difficult to tell whether this is a meaningful trend and, if so, whether climate change or natural weather variability is the cause, said University of Arizona atmospheric scientist Xubin Zeng, who ran the data. Still, Zeng, who has published studies...