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A rare and extreme tsunami ripped across an Alaska fjord three years ago after 180 million tons of mountain rock fell into the water, driving a devastating wave that stripped shorelines of trees and reached heights over 600 feet, a large team of scientists documented Thursday.The October 2015 cataclysm in Taan Fiord in Southeast Alaska appears to have been the fourth highest tsunami recorded in the past century, and its origins - tied to the retreat of a glacier - suggest it’s the kind of event we may see more of due to a warming climate..The new study even bluntly...

The world stands on the brink of failure when it comes to holding global warming to moderate levels, and nations will need to take “unprecedented” actions to cut their carbon emissions over the next decade, according to a landmark report by the top scientific body studying climate change. With global emissions showing few signs of slowing and the United States — the world’s second-largest emitter of carbon dioxide — rolling back a suite of Obama-era climate measures, the prospects for meeting the most ambitious goals of the 2015 Paris agreement look increasingly slim. To avoid racing past warming of 1.5...

A group of scientists says it has now reconstructed the history of the planet's sea levels arcing back over some 3,000 years - leading it to conclude that the rate of increase experienced in the 20th century was "extremely likely" to have been faster than during nearly the entire period. "We can say with 95 percent probability that the 20th-century rise was faster than any of the previous 27 centuries," said Bob Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University who led the research with nine colleagues from several U.S. and global universities. Kopp said it's not that seas rose faster...

It has often been cited as one of the classic examples of how changes in climate have shaped human history. Circa the year 985, Erik the Red led 25 ships from Iceland to Greenland, launching a Norse settlement there and giving the vast ice continent the name "Greenland." Within just a few decades, the Norse -- sometimes also dubbed Vikings -- would make it to Newfoundland as well. They maintained settlements of up to a few thousand people in southwest Greenland for several centuries, keeping livestock and hunting seals, building churches whose ruins still stand today, and sending back valuable...

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis was about to take a major step backing the science behind ­human-driven global warming, and Philippe de Larminat was determined to change his mind. A French doubter who authored a book arguing that solar activity — not greenhouse gases — was driving global warming, de Larminat sought a spot at a climate summit in April sponsored by the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Nobel laureates would be there. So would U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, U.S. economist Jeffrey Sachs and others calling for dramatic steps to curb carbon emissions. fter securing a high-level meeting at...

Everybody is jumping on a report out of the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting, which suggests — in, I think, a fairly well-documented fashion — that the administration of Florida Gov. Rick Scott had an aversion to the terms “climate change” and “global warming.” And it appears that the message about not using these words filtered down to state agency employees and officials at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.Scott himself has expressed skepticism about the science of climate change in the past, and more recently, retreated to the “I’m not a scientist” position of many GOP politicians.But for agency employees who study and try...

It is the F-word that dares not speak its name at the Washington Post. At least not in the WonkBlog story about plunging oil prices by Chris Mooney. That word is "fracking." Mooney is notorious for his antipathy towards fracking but his failure to attribute the large increase in U.S. oil production to it is laughable. Here is Mooney noticing that oil prices are going way down but fails to credit it to you-know-what due to his ideology:

The co-author of a book on partisan science recently examined by Pacific Standard argues that our reviewer was a little too partisan himself. Any book that touches upon politics almost automatically angers half of the American public, regardless of what is written inside of it. It takes a special person—an objective, open-minded and self-critical one—to read and learn from a science book that criticizes people with whom the reader likes and agrees with politically.Recently, Pacific Standard published a review (“Red Science, Blue Science,” January/February 2013) by Wray Herbert, a pop psychology writer,of political writer Chris Mooney’s book The Republican Brain...