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Some 90 million years ago, a temperate rainforest grew near the South Pole. Scientists recovered fossil traces of the ancient rainforest from seafloor sediment cores collected near West Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier. Seismic data suggested the sediment layer was unique, but researchers weren't expecting to find the remnants of a Cretaceous forest. "The finding of this well preserved 'forest soil' layer was actually a lucky dip," researcher Ulrich Salzmann, professor of palaeoecology at the University of Northumbria in Britain, told UPI. "We did not know of the existence of this layer before." Among the sediment layers, Salzmann and his research...

WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump is expected to relax ambitious Obama-era vehicle mileage standards and raise the ceiling on damaging fossil fuel emissions for years to come, gutting one of the United States’ single-biggest efforts against climate change. The Trump administration is expected to release a final rule Tuesday on mileage standards through 2026, watering down a tough Obama mileage standard that would have encouraged automakers globally to ramp up production of electric vehicles and more fuel-efficient gasoline vehicles. Trump’s Cabinet heads have continued a push to rollback public health and environment regulations despite the coronavirus outbreak riveting the world’s...

One of the key questions pertaining to the Wuhan cororavirus is whether warm weather will stop the pandemic. President Trump has suggested that it will. He says “a lot of people think that [the virus] goes away in April with the heat — as the heat comes in” and that “there’s a theory that, in April, when it gets warm — historically, that has been able to kill the virus.” Actually, this particular virus is new, so that, strictly speaking, there is no history to rely on. As with so much surrounding the Wuhan coronavirus, we don’t know really know...

Fluctuating solar and wind power require lots of energy storage, and lithium-ion batteries seem like the obvious choice—but they are far too expensive to play a major role. A pair of 500-foot smokestacks rise from a natural-gas power plant on the harbor of Moss Landing, California, casting an industrial pall over the pretty seaside town. If state regulators sign off, however, it could be the site of the world’s largest lithium-ion battery project by late 2020, helping to balance fluctuating wind and solar energy on the California grid. The 300-megawatt facility is one of four giant lithium-ion storage projects that...

In an end run around Republican legislators, Oregon’s Democratic governor ordered the state on Tuesday to lower greenhouse gas emissions, directing a state agency to set and enforce caps on pollution from industry and transportation fuels.

Rep. Dan “McCain 2.0” Crenshaw (R-TX) came out with an op/ed this week in National Review arguing that conservatives need to embrace the reality of climate change and propose a government solution to the supposed problem. “With ever-more-extreme “solutions” such as the Green New Deal being proposed, conservatives have quickly taken the bait, falling into the tired political trap set by leftists. But I believe we no longer have to do this. We can fight back against the alarmism with tangible solutions based on reason, science, and the free market,” he wrote. Crenshaw bragged in the op/ed that he is...

If atmospheric science is not science, what is it? It is the nearest thing to a religion, particularly for the liberal secular humanists, atheists, and agnostics of the left. It has a pretty close copy of the concept of original sin and drips with guilt. It is the lever that politicians on the left will use to change our economy, violate our constitution, and restrict our freedoms. It is offered as the "big problem" that only "big government" or maybe "world government" can solve. This stuff is "junk science." These folks read ice core samples and tree rings the way...

Charleston, South Carolina got a glimpse of its potential future in September when Hurricane Dorian grazed the South Carolina coast, bringing the three-headed monster of heavy rain, storm surge and extreme high tides with it. Tuesday night, seven Democratic candidates for President will take the stage in Charleston and try to make their cases for how they’ll stem the intensification of climate change, which is fueling that future marked by increased risk of powerful storms and chronic flooding across the Southeast. It’s been less than a week since the last Democratic debate in Nevada, where six candidates - former New...

Mark Ruffalo has nothing on his green alter ego these days. Sure, the actor’s signature character is mean, green and out of control. Compare that to what Ruffalo says in a new interview with the UK Independent: “We are approaching mass extinctions, food systems failing, hundreds of millions of displaced people looking for places that are hospitable.” Ruffalo spoke to the news outlet to promote “Dark Waters,” a fact-based film which hit theaters last year but failed to gain awards season buzz. The actor plays a lawyer fighting a powerful corporation tied to environmental-based deaths. The press seized on two...

A German teenager dubbed the “anti-Greta” – climate sceptics’ answer to the schoolgirl activist Greta Thunberg – is set to address the biggest annual gathering of US grassroots conservatives. Naomi Seibt, 19, who styles herself as a “climate sceptic” or “climate realist”, will this week address the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) near Washington, joining speakers including Donald Trump and Vice-President Mike Pence. Seibt is in the pay of the Heartland Institute, a thinktank closely allied with the White House that denies established science showing humans are heating the planet with dangerous consequences. CPAC will be the biggest stage yet...

LONDON, Feb 26 (Reuters) - BP said it will leave three U.S. petroleum trade groups, including the country’s main refining lobby, due to misaligned views over the energy transition to battle climate change. The decision comes after BP Chief Executive Officer Bernard Looney, who took office earlier this month, set one of the oil sector’s most ambitious targets for curbing carbon emissions with a vow to “re-invent” the 111-year old company in the face of the climate challenge. The London-based company said in a report on Wednesday that it will quit the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM), following similar...

Australia’s conservative coalition government will put jobs and the economy ahead of any U.N. demands for it to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Finance Minister Mathias Cormann said Sunday. Cormann said Australia’s government will work to set new long-term plans addressing greenhouse gas emissions ahead of yet another global climate summit in Glasgow year, however it won’t pursue any net-zero emissions policies that hurt workers in key economic areas.

Published: Sep 20, 2019 Governor directs Department of Finance to create a Climate Investment Framework to leverage the state’s $700 billion CalPERS, CalSTRS and UC Retirement Program portfolio to drive investment toward carbon-neutral technologiesGovernor Newsom also signs legislation strengthening the state’s emissions standards and establishing the nation’s first “smog check� for diesel trucksSACRAMENTO – Just days before global leaders converge in New York City for Climate Week and months after California struck a major agreement with four automakers on vehicle emission standards, Governor Gavin Newsom today signed a landmark executive order to leverage the state’s $700 billion pension investment portfolio...

For generations, Pennsylvania’s blue-collar voters found political refuge in the Democratic Party. Even when the national party moved leftward on social issues, this voting bloc—largely Catholic, with multigenerational roots in coal and steel towns—elected Democrats to defend their economic interests. But the party’s environmental activists are jeopardizing this allegiance. A clash is taking place between progressives, who want a carbon-free future, and organized labor, which sees fossil-fuel industries and the jobs they create as essential for many communities. This opposition, reflective of a national trend, could fracture the party statewide and help ensure another victory for Donald Trump. From Pennsylvania’s...

Two radically different approaches for how to mitigate the potential negative impacts of climate change have been advanced recently. On the left we have The Ahuman Manifesto—a tract authored by Patricia MacCormack, a professor of continental philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University in the United Kingdom. The Professor argues for human extinction as the best solution to the perils of climate change. "My interest in feminism and queer theory led me by a process of logical deduction to the conclusion that the human race must be exterminated in order to save the planet for other species," she said. "Humankind is currently...

An international organization of environmental protestors dug up the lawn of Trinity College, Cambridge, as part of a week-long series of demonstrations for fossil fuel divestment. Extinction Rebellion protestors dug channels into the turf of Trinity College’s 16th-century great gate with shovels and pitchforks and planted their flags. “Trinity College must cut ties with fossil fuel companies and stop trying to hawk off nature for profit,” the organization’s Facebook page says. “Oh, and it should take the opportunity to replace the lawn with flowers. Spring is just around the corner after all.”

After three years of apocalyptic wailing and gnashing of environmentalist teeth over President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the job and economy killing Paris Climate Accord, it is ironic that the one country that faces the brunt of criticism from climate change zealots such as Greta Thunberg is leading the world and the European Union in lowering emissions and promoting cleaner energy, such as natural gas, all the while not hurting the economy: Despite shrieks of terror from the left about how President Donald Trump’s presidency threatens the existence of Earth and thus mankind, the fact is that under his...

His stepfather, Carsten Jensen, said on Facebook that Coleman “collapsed without prior health problems” during a trip. Coleman was born in London and appeared in several movies as a child, including “The Fourth Kind” and “It’s Alive.” He was best known for playing Eric Brown, aged 11, in the 2005 British comedy movie “Nanny McPhee,” alongside Emma Thompson, Colin Firth and Angela Lansbury. His former castmate, Eliza Bennett, said she was “heartbroken” at the news. “After we worked on Nanny McPhee, he dedicated his life to protecting wildlife and fighting climate change,” she wrote. He became an active member of...

Berlin-based climate activist Karin Louise Hermes has left the climate movement because she couldnÂ’t deal with the white people anymore. She felt like her concerns as a person of colour, about the racist impact of climate change, were not adequately represented or respected. What this means is that identity politics is eating itself. WeÂ’ve heard tell about the climate crisis facing our world. The rhetoric goes that weÂ’ve got maybe 12 years to turn this ship around before we all suffer something akin to the fate of the dinosaurs and cause our own extinction. Greta Thunberg practically dropped out of...

We are in a climate emergency. We have to get Donald Trump out of the White House and treat climate change like the existential threat that it is — before it's too late. https://t.co/449eZamU9S— Joe Biden (Text Join to 30330) (@JoeBiden) February 9, 2020