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Los Angeles could join New York City and other California cities in a lawsuit targeting Exxon Mobil for supposedly contributing to global warming and rising sea levels. Two Los Angeles city council members want the city to use the courts to fleece fossil-fuel producers to mitigate the effects of global warming. They are hoping to join the likes of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who announced earlier this month that his city will take Exxon to court.

According to the study published last week in the journal Science Advances, researchers with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany used computer simulations to study changing regional rainfall patterns. They found that the United States, Indonesia, Central Europe and parts of India and Africa will be particularly susceptible to dangerous flooding in the decades to come. The researchers point out that the risk of river flooding will rise despite efforts to rein in climate change by curbing greenhouse emissions. They say the greenhouse gases already emitted in past decades have done irreversible harm. Should global warming exceed...

There could be no starker illustration of the profound differences that exist between Washington and London -- despite alignment on many other issues -- than comments this week by our two leaders on climate change and the environment. For President Trump, the Paris Agreement is a bad deal that will close US businesses -- perhaps even has closed some already. Meanwhile, in London last week, Prime Minister Theresa May was launching the UK's 25-year Plan for Nature. Its flagship pledge is to "leave the environment in a better state than we found it". The evidence is entirely against the world...

The left is fond of trying to tie unrelated issues to gender, race, or sexual orientation. A recent example is Trump's description of some countries as "sh*tholes." His comment was considered racist even though everyone knows there are many nations where no one wants to live, or even visit. In this case, scoring the president for even daring to mention some nations are better than others set off a firestorm of false criticism. So, it shouldn't surprise us that the NAACP has taken two entirely different issues and has twisted logic into a pretzel in order to connect them....

California is poised to meet its goal to reduce greenhouse gases 33 percent, to 1990 levels, by the year 2020. Its targets for use of more renewable energy by that date are, in some cases, already exceeded. ...hold on tight for what comes next. The state’s overarching plan was intended to ease industry and consumers into a carbon-free future bit by bit; ten years in, the training wheels are off. Emissions-reduction must hit 40 percent by 2030 and twice that by 2050. In 12 years, half the state’s energy must come from renewable sources. 14 million buildings must operate twice...

Litigation may be as American as apple pie, but some lawsuits are so destructive that they stand out even among the hugely expensive wreckage wrought by our legal system. The most prominent current example is the "children's" climate lawsuit (Juliana v U.S.): A group of kids, including "future generations, through their guardian Dr. James Hansen," claim that the government's actions and failures to act have caused climate change, thus violating the youngest generation's constitutional rights to life, liberty and property, and have failed to protect essential public trust resources. I leave the numerous legal issues to the lawyers, although precisely...

A broad survey of climate change literature for 2017 reveals that the alleged “consensus” behind the dangers of anthropogenic global warming is not nearly as settled among climate scientists as people imagine. Author Kenneth Richard found that during the course of the year 2017, at…

Damage from extreme weather events during 2017 racked up the biggest-ever bills for the U.S. Most of these events involved conditions that align intuitively with global warming: heat records, drought, wildfires, coastal flooding, hurricane damage and heavy rainfall. Paradoxical, though, are possible ties between climate change and the recent spate of frigid weeks in eastern North America. A very new and "hot topic" in climate change research is the notion that rapid warming and wholesale melting of the Arctic may be playing a role in causing persistent cold spells. It doesn't take a stretch of the imagination to suppose that...

OSLO - Global warming is on track to breach the toughest limit set in the Paris climate agreement by the middle of this century unless governments make unprecedented economic shifts from fossil fuels, a draft U.N. report said. The draft, of a report due for publication in October, said governments will also have to start sucking carbon dioxide from the air to achieve the ambition of limiting temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times. “There is very high risk that ... global warming will exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels,” the U.N. panel of experts wrote,...

Several California cities and counties are suing Big Oil for allegedly suppressing evidence of climate change dangers. But ExxonMobil's attorneys did some legwork and found something interesting in municipal bond offerings of many of the same cities and counties suing them. Those offerings include several examples of climate change threats being downplayed or even completely ignored. The Big Oil lawyers also note that: * San Francisco has twice made bond offerings for its Municipal Transportation Agency since 2014 that do not contain the words "global warming" or "climate change." * San Mateo County is suing the oil companies because it...

A broad survey of climate change literature for 2017 reveals that the alleged “consensus” behind the dangers of anthropogenic global warming is not nearly as settled among climate scientists as people imagine. Author Kenneth Richard found that during the course of the year 2017, at least 485 scientific papers were published that in some way questioned the supposed consensus regarding the perils of human CO2 emissions or the efficacy of climate models to predict the future.

Alarmist scientists have found a terrifying new ‘ climate change’ threat: mutant transgender turtles. Their study, titled Environmental Warming and Feminization of One of the Largest Sea Turtle Populations in the World, warns that global warming could turn the world’s sea turtle populations female, possibly leading to their extinction. The study authors, from NOAA’s Marine Mammal and Turtle division in La Jolla, California, analyzed sea turtle populations on beaches at the northern and southern ends of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

A recent article in the Scientific American titled “Climate Change May Have Helped Spark Iran’s Protests” suggests climate – not Iran’s active export of terrorism and neglect of its civilian population – is responsible for the second consecutive week of protests in the Islamic Republic. “The impacts of climate change are among the environmental challenges facing Iran that helped spark protests in dozens of cities across the Islamic republic,” the publication wrote. At least 22 people have died during the protests, which began on December 28. One young man, 23-year-old Sina Ghanbari, reportedly died while in custody at Iran’s notorious...

Today, New York City took the climate advocacy fight to the fossil fuel industry's doorstep. NYC mayor Bill de Blasio officially announced that the city will be the first to divest all its pension funds – a total of $191 billion – from fossil fuels. That means roughly $5 billion in fossil fuel investments will be taken away from fossil fuel companies, which is reportedly the largest of any municipality to date. At the same time, the city has launched legal action against five major oil organizations: ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, and ConocoPhillips. Arguing that they played a...

MOSCOW -- Increasingly frequent snowfalls in the Sahara Deseret are evidence of the much talked about global warming trend, just like the unusually warm winters in Russia, bitter cold spells in the US and floods in Europe, Head of Russia’s Federal Service for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring Roman Vilfand told TASS. On January 7, snow blanketed the Sahara Desert north of Algeria’s city of Ain Sefra. The snow cover was about 40cm deep but melted by night. A year earlier, in December 2016, snow fell in the region for the first time since 1979. "Such situations, including snowfalls in Sahara,...

On Sept. 23, 2016, a group of protesters blocked a Burlington Northern Santa Fe freight train carrying coal in Spokane, WA, to prevent the earth from warming up. From a scientific standpoint, the action was absurd. As a piece of a political theater, it may have been more effective. The blockage by Rev. George Taylor and other members of groups called Veterans for Peace and Raging Grannies garnered widespread press coverage. And the protest may trigger a legal revolution as well. In a hearing tomorrow, a judge in Spokane is expected to hand down a written ruling allowing Taylor to...

Princeton University researchers have found that the climate models scientists use to project future conditions on our planet underestimate the cooling effect that clouds have on a daily — and even hourly — basis, particularly over land. The researchers report in the journal Nature Communications that models tend to factor in too much of the sun’s daily heat, which results in warmer, drier conditions than might actually occur. The researchers found that inaccuracies in accounting for the diurnal, or daily, cloud cycle did not seem to invalidate climate projections, but they did increase the margin of error for a crucial...

The precise extent of human-induced climate change is unclear, but the basic science is unequivocal, as is the danger it poses to the United States. This threat comes from the direct impact of climate change on agricultural production and sea levels but equally importantly from the huge waves of migration that climate change is likely to cause, on a scale that even the world’s richest states and societies will be unable either to prevent or accommodate. Yet for two out of the past four U.S. administrations, action on this issue has been frozen due to the refusal of a large...

Washington Governor Claims ‘Just 59 Days’ To Save Children From Global Warming Michael Bastasch 4:47 PM 01/09/2018 Washington state’s Democratic Governor Jay Inslee warned there was “just 59 days” to save future generations from “an endless cycle of crop-killing droughts one year, and rivers spilling their banks the next.” Inslee went on a lengthy Twitter rant in efforts to convince the state legislature to pass legislation to tax carbon dioxide emissions. Washington residents voted down Inslee’s last carbon tax plan by a wide margin in 2016. We have just 59 days to do our part to save our children from...

The article claims that German Chancellor Merkel and her coaltion non-government have agreed to abandon their current climate-change plans - or, at least, to kick the can five years down the road. Further evidence that President Trump was right to pull out of the Paris accord, which (as most people already knew) was a sham from the beginning.