Free Republic

The amount of water stored on lands across Earth’s continents has declined at such staggering levels that changes are likely irreversible while humans are alive, a study published Thursday found. The losses in soil moisture — a result of the planet’s climate conditions and prolonged droughts — already pose issues for farming, irrigation systems and critical water resources for humans. But it also affects sea-level rise and Earth’s rotation — datasets the research team used to better track water storage for decades longer than previous studies. “What we were looking for was evidence of changing hydrology around the world,” said...

As Los Angeles’s deadly wildfires continue to burn, a group of survivors is taking aim at the industry most responsible for fueling climate disasters: fossil fuels. Residents impacted by the blazes lamented during a Thursday conference call losing their homes and communities and called for litigation and policies that could force big oil to pay for the damages. In the coming days, lawmakers will introduce legislation with that aim in mind....... There is mounting evidence that big oil knew for decades that their products fuel the climate crisis, yet continued to peddle them to the public anyway and sow doubt...

The Supreme Court heard a bizarre case Monday that dealt with the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. A coalition of red states and coal companies are gesturing towards a rule that is no longer on the books — Obama’s Clean Power Plan — as a way to bring before the conservative court questions of how the EPA can act on climate. It’s a case where the justices handcuffing the EPA from its ability to keep some of the country’s biggest polluters from belching greenhouse gasses into the air is actually not the worst...

A new climate report released this week by a global panel of scientists warned that the evidence of human-caused climate change is continuing to mount and that the planet is inching closer to irreversible damage should nothing be done to mitigate the warming of Earth's climate. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which comprises 270 scientists from 67 countries, released a report on Monday, Feb. 28, addressing the impacts of climate change on ecosystems and human communities at global and regional levels, called "Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability." AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Brett Anderson, who closely monitors...

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....