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FULL TITLE: 'We Really Muffed The Error Margins': Global Warming Report Rendered Worthless After Scientists Point Out Flaw In Ocean-Warming Survey A major climate change report has been corrected, as two scientists found a glaring error in an ocean-warming report. The original report was alarming; oceans are warming at a rate 60 percent higher than what was first reported by a United Nations panel. The world is ending, folks. It’s The Day After Tomorrow, except that it’s not. The oceans aren’t warning at that rate. In fact, the range is so great that experts can no longer stand by their...

On a bright July day 2 years ago, Kurt Kjær was in a helicopter flying over northwest Greenland—an expanse of ice, sheer white and sparkling. Soon, his target came into view: Hiawatha Glacier, a slow-moving sheet of ice more than a kilometer thick. It advances on the Arctic Ocean not in a straight wall, but in a conspicuous semicircle, as though spilling out of a basin. Kjær, a geologist at the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, suspected the glacier was hiding an explosive secret. The helicopter landed near the surging river that drains the glacier, sweeping out rocks...

Historic levels of particles in the atmosphere released from pre-industrial era fires, and their cooling effect on the planet, may have been significantly underestimated according to a new study. Historic levels of particles in the atmosphere released from pre-industrial era fires, and their cooling effect on the planet, may have been significantly underestimated according to a new study. Fires cause large amounts of tiny particles, known as aerosols, to be released into the atmosphere. These aerosols, such as the soot in smoke or chemicals released by burning trees, can cool the planet by reflecting sunlight back into space and increasing...

New York Congresswoman-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the most prominent of the progressive millennials elected to Congress in the midterm elections, joined a protest led by left-wing groups Justice Democrats and the Sunrise Movement outside House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's personal office calling for House Democrats to put forward a climate plan. Protesters called for Democrats, who will have a substantial majority in the House next year, to create a select committee to develop a plan to switch to 100 percent renewable energy. The demonstration was spurred by a recent United Nations report that showed that the world only has 12 years to limit global warming to manageable...

People need to cut back on burgers because they're contributing to climate change, the United Nations said this week. The United Nations Environment Program said research shows that Americans eat about three burgers a week, and if one of those was swapped for "a plant-based alternative burger for one year, it would be like taking the greenhouse gases from 12 million cars off the road for a year." The World Economic Forum blames the beef and dairy industries for churning out more greenhouse gas emissions than oil companies or some countries like Germany. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association argued that...

For the past four years, a big policy proposal has dominated the climate-change policy debate in Washington state: how to put a price on the state’s oil, natural gas and coal emissions that are helping to warm the world.

Matt Stone and Trey Parker — the “South Park” creators known for their take-no-prisoners mockery of cultural issues from both sides of the sociopolitical aisle — apparently are feeling a little guilty for mocking Al Gore’s climate change evangelism. See, way back in 2006, a “South Park” episode featured the former vice president warning South Park Elementary School students about the “single biggest threat to our planet” — i.e., ManBearPig, a monster representing climate change, NBC News reported. Gore was a month away from releasing “An Inconvenient Truth” when that episode came out — and the network noted that since...

A collective-risk dilemma experiment with members of the public in Barcelona has shown that people are more or less likely to contribute money to fighting climate change depending on their how wealthy they are. And the results indicate that participants with fewer resources were prepared to contribute significantly more to the public good than wealthier people, sometimes up to twice as much. These are the principal findings of a study by researchers who measured how a group of individuals acted in the face of a common threat. To do so they designed a "lab-in-the-field" experiment involving more than 320 individuals...

More than 1,600 scientists signed a letter denouncing President Trump administration’s plan to narrow the definition of gender to be strictly biological, according to Buzzfeed. The letter was written in response to a memo reportedly drafted by the Department of Health and Human Services, according to the New York Times. The memo states that any disputes about a person’s sex would be clarified using genetic testing, which scientists who signed the letter called unscientific and unethical. “This proposal is fundamentally inconsistent not only with science, but also with ethical practices, human rights, and basic dignity,” the scientists wrote. Among the...

Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right nationalist who on Sunday was elected Brazil’s new president, has been called the “Brazilian Trump.” But he’s more extreme than that. His rhetoric is more explicitly violent and bigoted, and his rule threatens more than just the fourth-largest democracy in the world. The livability of the entire planet is at stake. The Amazon rainforest, more than half of which is within Brazil’s borders, covers 4 percent of the earth’s surface and is a major regulator of the world’s climate. Its trees act as a sponge for carbon dioxide, absorbing the planet-warming gas from the atmosphere and...

Democratic Candidate Criticizes Agriculture Industry, Suggests Workers Transition To Renewable Energy Instead The Democratic nominee in Georgia’s gubernatorial election had to walk back comments that suggested the agriculture and hospitality industries weren’t worth working in. The controversy began when Stacey Abrams was giving a speech at Georgia Southern University as part of her “We Are Georgia” bus tour. “I want to create a lot of different jobs because people shouldn’t have to go into agriculture or hospitality to make a living in Georgia. Why not create renewable energy jobs because — I’m going to tell ya’ll a secret — climate...

Add beer to chocolate, coffee, and wine as some of life’s little pleasures that global warming will make scarcer and costlier, scientists say. Increasing bouts of extreme heat waves and drought will hurt production of barley, a key beer ingredient, in the future. Losses of barley yield can be as much as 17 percent, an international group of researchers estimated. That means beer prices on average would double, even adjusting for inflation, according to the study in Monday’s journal Nature Plants . In countries like Ireland, where cost of a brew is already high, prices could triple. The findings come...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change climate forecasts were wrong from their earliest reports in 1990. They were so inaccurate that they stopped calling them forecasts and made three “projections”: low, medium, and high. Since then, even their “low” scenario projections were wrong. Writing in 2002 about the SPM of Working Group I of the IPCC Third Assessment Report, IPCC Reviewer and independent analyst David Wojick explained the sort of problems typical of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change summary reports: What is systematically omitted from the Summary for Policymakers are precisely the uncertainties and positive counter evidence that might negate...

“Although not the most concerning impact of future climate change, climate-related weather extremes may threaten the availability and economic accessibility of beer,” the study’s authors wrote. Barley is the main ingredient in beer, and projected increases in “extreme drought and heat” could hurt barley production. Many media outlets ran with the study’s alarming findings.

Research by Oregon State's Betts and Sarah Frey found warblers declined in areas with young forests, including those replanted after clear-cut logging. But hermit warblers are doing better in other areas. "In landscapes that had more older forest, their population declines were lowered, or even reversed, even though the climate has been warming," Frey says. The Pacific Northwest has had a decades-long push to preserve its old-growth forests, and the warblers thrived in them. That suggests these forests somehow shielded them from the ill effects of rising temperatures. The question is why, and that is where this new study comes...

Former Vice President Al Gore said Friday that the United Nations' new report on climate change demonstrates that the world is experiencing a "global emergency." “We have a global emergency,” Gore said in an interview on PBS NewsHour. "You use a phrase like that and some people immediately say, ‘okay calm down, it can’t be that bad.’ But it it is." "What the scientists have warned us in this recent report is that if we do not take action quickly … then consequences down the road would be far, far worse than what we’re experiencing now," Gore added, stating that...

Democratic House candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rallied an audience of supporters in Washington Thursday evening with calls to implement single-payer health care and tuition-free college – along with an appeal to stop fossil fuel production entirely. Ocasio-Cortez, who is running to represent New York’s 14th Congressional District, has made no secret of her opposition to fossil fuels. She’s called for politicians to forsake donations from the industry and is pushing a “Green New Deal” plan which entails a shift to 100 percent renewable energy by 2035. But she cast her position in stark terms Thursday, during a fundraiser at a restaurant...

“Victims of Hurricane Michael voted for climate deniers,” reads the headline an article by Abraham, published in The Guardian Thursday. “Elections have consequences. Denying science has consequences. And we are reaping what we sow,” the subhead reads. . . . Despite the lack of science to support for his case, Abraham blames Michael’s intensity on man-made global warming, leading to his subsequent claim that southern voters brought this upon themselves by voting Republicans into office.

A United Nations special climate report suggests a tax on carbon dioxide emissions would need to be as high as $27,000 per ton at the end of the century to effectively limit global warming. For Americans, that’s the same as a $240 per gallon tax on gasoline in the year 2100, should such a recommendation be adopted. In 2030, the report says a carbon tax would need to be as high as $5,500 — that’s equivalent to a $49 per gallon gas tax. If you think that’s an unlikely scenario, you’re probably not wrong. However, it’s what the Intergovernmental Panel...

The claim that carbon dioxide (CO2) can increase air temperatures by "trapping" infrared radiation (IR) ignores the fact that in 1909 physicist R.W. Wood disproved the popular 19th Century thesis that greenhouses stayed warm by trapping IR. Unfortunately, many people who claim to be scientists are unaware of Wood's experiment which was originally published in the Philosophical magazine , 1909, vol 17, p319-320. Philosophical Magazine might not sound like the name of a science publication, but a century ago leading scientists published their discoveries in it. During the early 19th Century many physicists supported the theory postulated by Benjamin Franklin...