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John Kerry reiterated his concerns Thursday that the Russian invasion of Ukraine would distract the world from the pressing need to address climate change before it’s too late. “What’s happened in Ukraine has not helped to concentrate people on reducing [emissions],” Kerry, President Joe Biden’s climate envoy, told The Washington Post. “It’s concentrated people on trying to find substitutes for Russian gas and to meet higher levels of production because of low supply.” “But it obviously does interrupt the momentum that we had created coming out of Glasgow,” he added, referencing the United Nations climate summit in Scotland in November....

A new report released this week by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) looks at the causes, impacts and solutions to climate change. The report gives the clearest indication to date of how a warmer world is affecting all living things on Earth. Here are five things we learnt from it. 1- Things are way worse than we thought From the melting of the Greenland ice sheet to the destruction of coral reefs, climate related impacts are hitting the world at the high end of what modellers once expected. And much more quickly than previously assessed by the...

The upcoming polar plunge will cause temperatures across the northern United States to drop by as much as 50 degrees, during a time when war may break out in Europe. This is a reminder of how important affordable American energy sources are. Europe is weak because it is in the grip of an energy crisis with some prices soaring tenfold in the last two years. Europe depends for nearly 30% of its oil and gas supplies on Russia, while German manufacturing is particularly dependent for energy on Russia after environmentalists forced Germany to dismantle all 17 of its nuclear power...

When I was about 15 years old, I star­ted organ­iz­ing around climate change, work­ing with friends to organ­ize teach-ins at high schools and middle schools around the region. At 18, I atten­ded the United Nations Climate Confer­ence in Peru in 2014, the meet­ing that preceded the Paris climate summit, where a land­mark global agree­ment on climate change was signed. If I could go back in time, I would have never atten­ded the confer­ence — it aroused in me an over­whelm­ing feel­ing of power­less­ness and hope­less­ness that led me away from the climate move­ment for years. The huge jump in scale...

The world is unlikely to reach the 'worst case scenario' of climate change by the end of the century, according to a new study, that found efforts to reduce emissions are helping keep warning under control. The Paris Climate Agreement goal to limit global warming this century to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit over pre-industrial temperatures was set in December 2015. This urged nations to take action to reduce emissions of greenhouse gasses in order to forestal the most extreme climate change scenarios being predicted by scientists at the time - that could see temperatures rise by up to 9 degrees Fahrenheit....

What with the ongoing catastrophe in Afghanistan and the earthquake in Haiti, among other news, you may have failed to notice that the IPCC came out on Monday with substantial parts of its long-awaited Sixth Assessment Report on the state of the world’s climate. This is the first such assessment issued by the IPCC since 2014. The most important piece is the so-called “Summary for Policymakers,” (SPM), a 41 page section that is the only part that anyone ever reads. The IPCC attempts to cloak itself in the mantle of “science,” but its real mission is to attempt to scare...

I care about the future; therefore, I care about the climate. I belong to the vast majority of global citizens who, as poll after poll show, are concerned about the direction the planet is heading and understand the urgency and existential nature of the impending climate emergency. The recent catastropic flooding in central Europe and extreme high temperatures in North America are just a few symptoms of this. So in my family, we do something about it. We scrimp and save on our carbon budget: we walk or ride bikes instead of driving our car; we eat dramatically less meat...

Mayors from 51 cities from across the U.S. and around the world are meeting in Chicago to hear from former President Obama and sign a document they are calling the “Chicago Climate Charter.” President Trump announced his intention to pull the U.S. out of the UN’s Paris Climate Accord, however, the terms of the Accord delay his taking formal action until November, 2019. The mayors gathered in Chicago, meanwhile, are vowing to bypass the federal government and create climate policies of their own. USA Today reports that the Chicago Charter calls for reducing greenhouse gas emissions at least 26% to...

The Trump administration is in the beginning stages of forming an adversarial "red team" to play devil's advocate in a plan to debate the facts behind global warming and take on what skeptics call climate alarmism. The White House and the Environmental Protection Agency are recruiting scientists by enlisting the help of the Heartland Institute, considered to be the lead think tank for challenging the majority of scientists on climate change. The institute has its own red team, which is the antithesis to the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which it calls, unabashedly, the Nongovernmental International Panel on...

Christie pulling N.J. out of greenhouse gas pact By Maya Rao INQUIRER TRENTON BUREAU TRENTON - Gov. Christie said today New Jersey will withdraw from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a cap-and-trade agreement between 10 northeast states, by the end of the year. The governor acknowledged that humans play a role in global warming but said the program does not address the problem. "This program is not effective in reducing greenhouse gases and is unlikely to be in the future," said the governor, standing alongside Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Bob Martin at a statehouse news conference. The goal of...

The rate at which ice is disappearing from Greenland and Western Antarctica has been seriously overestimated, according to new research. Contrasting estimates of Greenland ice melt. Previous analysis in blue: New in red. The colour bands represent uncertainty. Credit: Nature Geoscience 'Deviates rather sharply from general assumptions' - Yes. Measuring a disappearing ice cap is actually quite difficult to do, as the areas in question are remote, hostile environments and the exact depth of ice is often unknown. This has caused a lot of argument among climate scientists regarding how much ice is melting and running into the sea, as...

Dr Spencer, formerly senior scientist for climate studies at NASA, now leads the US science team for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOS (AMSRE) on NASA’s Aqua satellite. He co-developed the original satellite method for precise monitoring of global temperatures from Earth-orbiting satellites. He’s just the kind of egghead the IPCC claims to represent when it tells us the world is getting dangerously warmer, it’s man’s fault – the result of CO2 emissions – and it must be urgently addressed. Except Dr Spencer doesn’t agree with any of that. He thinks it’s all nonsense, based on a very elementary...

One to 3 feet of snow fell in the western Plains yesterday, while up to 1/2 inch of freezing rain fell in the central Plains. The precipitation was in response to a potent upper low in the Southern Plains and an associated surface low, which caused upslope flow conditions. The heaviest snowfall amounts were observed in the Colorado Front Range and in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of New Mexico. Strong surface winds in these areas caused much blowing and drifting snow. Most of the snowpack across the West and western Plains is cool, with cold conditions at the lower...