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Space junk in Earth's orbit may increase because of the effects of the same heat-trapping gases that are polluting the air and warming the planet, according to a recent study. What's happening? A team led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers determined that, with Earth's warming, space debris could accumulate enough to reduce the low Earth orbit area available for satellites by between a third and 82% by the year 2100, as the Associated Press detailed. The reason for this, per the study published in Nature Sustainability in March, is that climatic changes high above ground could reduce the effectiveness...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The world’s biggest corporations have caused $28 trillion in climate damage, a new study estimates as part of an effort to make it easier for people and governments to hold companies financially accountable, like the tobacco giants have been. A Dartmouth College research team came up with the estimated pollution caused by 111 companies, with more than half of the total dollar figure coming from 10 fossil fuel providers: Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, National Iranian Oil Co., Pemex, Coal India and the British Coal Corporation. For comparison, $28 trillion is a shade less than...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Giving a new meaning to the phrase mad scientists, angry researchers, doctors, their patients and supporters ventured out of labs, hospitals and offices Friday to fight against what they call a blitz on life-saving science by the Trump administration. In the nation’s capital, a couple thousand gathered at the Stand Up for Science rally. Organizers said similar rallies were planned in more than 30 U.S. cities. Politicians, scientists, musicians, doctors and their patients made the case that firings, budget and grant cuts in health, climate, science and other research government agencies in the Trump administration’s first 47...

Climate change is accelerating the melting of the world’s mountain glaciers, according to a massive new study that found them shrinking more than twice as fast as in the early 2000s. The study drew on an international effort that included 233 estimates of changes in glacier weight. The world’s glaciers have lost more than 7 trillion tons of ice since 2000, according to the study. “The thing that people should be aware of and perhaps worried about is that yes, the glaciers are indeed retreating and disappearing as we said they would. The rate of that loss seems to be...

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump says he will again withdraw the United States, a top carbon polluting nation, from the landmark Paris climate agreement, dealing a blow to worldwide efforts to combat global warming and once again distancing the U.S. from its closest allies.The White House announcement, which came as Trump was sworn in Monday to a second term, echoed Trump’s actions in 2017, when he announced that the U.S. would abandon the global Paris accord. The pact is aimed at limiting long-term global warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above pre-industrial levels or, failing that, keeping...

Frigid air that normally stays trapped in the Arctic has escaped, plunging deep into the United States for an extended visit that is expected to provoke teeth-chattering but not be record-shattering. It’s a cold air outbreak that some experts say is happening more frequently, and paradoxically, because of a warming world.

The eco fanatics over at The Associated Press are trying to have their cake and eat it too by screeching “climate change” to explain both freezing and warm weather happening simultaneously around the world. AP’s climate agitprop artist-in-chief Seth Borenstein ran another one of his signature environmentalist specials with a headline that was nothing short of comical: “US in deep freeze while much of the world is extra toasty? Yet again, it’s climate change.” Borenstein must have realized that his headline was contradictory because he tried to explain it away in the first paragraph of his piece: “Much of the...

It was a smell that invoked a memory. Both for Emily Kuchlbauer in North Carolina and Ryan Bomba in Chicago. It was smoke from wildfires, the odor of an increasingly hot and occasionally on-fire world. “It’s been very apocalyptic feeling, because in California the dialogue is like, ‘Oh, it’s normal. This is just what happens on the West Coast,’ but it’s very much not normal here,” Kuchlbauer said. As Earth’s climate continues to change from heat-trapping gases spewed into the air, ever fewer people are out of reach from the billowing and deadly fingers of wildfire smoke, scientists say. Already...

The cause of global warming is showing no signs of slowing as heat-trapping carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere increased to record highs in its annual Spring peak, jumping at one of the fastest rates on record, officials announced Monday. Carbon dioxide levels in the air are now the highest they’ve been in more than 4 million years because of the burning of oil coal and gas. The last time the air had similar amounts was during a less hospitable hothouse Earth before human civilization took root, scientists said. “To me as an atmospheric scientist, that trend is very concerning,” said...

Climate change is making major league sluggers into even hotter hitters, sending an extra 50 or so home runs a year over the fences, a new study found. Hotter, thinner air that allows balls to fly farther contributed a tiny bit to a surge in home runs since 2010, according to a statistical analysis by Dartmouth College scientists published in Friday’s Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. They analyzed 100,000 major league games and more than 200,000 balls put into play in the last few years along with weather conditions, stadiums and other factors. “Global warming is juicing home runs...

DENVER (AP) — Earth’s fever persisted last year, not quite spiking to a record high but still in the top five or six warmest on record, government agencies reported Thursday. But expect record-shattering hot years soon, likely in the next couple years because of “relentless” climate change from the burning of coal, oil and gas, U.S. government scientists said.

SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt (AP) — Men usually outnumber and outrank women negotiators in climate talks, except when it comes to global warming’s thorniest diplomatic issue this year — reparations for climate disasters. The issue of polluting nations paying vulnerable countries is handed over to women, who got the issue on the agenda after 30 years. Whether this year’s climate talks in Egypt succeed or fail mostly will come down to the issue called loss and damage in international negotiations, officials and experts say. It’s an issue that intertwines equity and economics, balancing the needs of those hurt and those who...

The world is getting hotter and more crowded and the two issues are connected, but not quite as much as people might think, experts say. On Tuesday somewhere a baby will be born that will be the globe’s 8 billionth person, according to a projection by the United Nations and other experts. The Earth has warmed almost 0.9°C (1.6°F) since the world hit the 4 billion mark in 1974. Climate and population is a touchy subject for scientists and officials. While more people consuming energy, mostly from the burning of fossil fuels, is warming the planet, the key issue isn’t...

SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt (AP) — Earth’s warming weather and rising seas are getting worse and doing so faster than before, the World Meteorological Organization warned Sunday in a somber note as world leaders started gathering for international climate negotiations. “The latest State of the Global Climate report is a chronicle of climate chaos,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said. “We must answer the planet’s distress signal with action -- ambitious, credible climate action.” In its annual state of the climate report, the United Nations’ weather agency said that sea level rise in the past decade was double what it was...

Extreme weather from climate change triggered hunger in nearly 100 million people and increased heat deaths by 68% in vulnerable populations worldwide as the world’s “fossil fuel addiction” degrades public health each year, doctors reported in a new study. Worldwide the burning of coal, oil, natural gas and biomass forms air pollution that kills 1.2 million people a year, including 11,800 in the United States, according to a report Tuesday in the prestigious medical journal Lancet. “Our health is at the mercy of fossil fuels,” said University College of London health and climate researcher Marina Romanello, executive director of the...

A quick study by two scientists calculates that climate change made Hurricane Ian 10% rainier than it would have been if there were no such thing as global warming. Climate change added at least 10% more rain to Hurricane Ian, a study prepared immediately after the storm shows. Thursday's research, which is not peer-reviewed, compared peak rainfall rates during the real storm to about 20 different computer scenarios of a model with Hurricane Ian's characteristics slamming into the Sunshine State in a world with no human-caused climate change. “The real storm was 10% wetter than the storm that might have...

Hurricane Ian is quickly gaining monstrous strength as it moves over oceans partly heated up by climate change, just like 30 other Atlantic tropical storms since 2017 that became much more powerful in less than a day. As the world warms, this turbo-charging of storms is likely to become even more frequent, scientists say. While climate change doesn’t create Ian and other hurricanes, scientists say that a warming world means an increase in rapidly intensifying storms. Climate change also is making storms slower and wetter, worsening deadly storm surges through sea-level rise, increasing freshwater flooding and expanding the proportion of...

Even if the world somehow manages to limit future warming to the strictest international temperature goal, four Earth-changing climate “tipping points” are still likely to be triggered with a lot more looming as the planet heats more after that, a new study said. An international team of scientists looked at 16 climate tipping points — when a warming side effect is irreversible, self-perpetuating and major — and calculated rough temperature thresholds at which they are triggered. None of them are considered likely at current temperatures, though a few are possible. But with only a few more tenths of a degree...

Zombie ice from the massive Greenland ice sheet will eventually raise global sea level by at least 10 inches (27 centimeters) on its own, according to a study released Monday. Zombie or doomed ice is ice that is still attached to thicker areas of ice, but is no longer getting fed by those larger glaciers. That’s because the parent glaciers are getting less replenishing snow. Meanwhile the doomed ice is melting from climate change, said study co-author William Colgan, a glaciologist at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. “It’s dead ice. It’s just going to melt and disappear from...

Experts are ignoring the worst possible climate change catastrophic scenarios, including collapse of society or the potential extinction of humans, however unlikely, a group of top scientists claim. Eleven scientists from around the world are calling on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s authoritative climate science organization, to do a special science report on “catastrophic climate change” to “bring into focus how much is at stake in a worst-case scenario.” In their perspective piece in Monday’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences they raise the idea of human extinction and worldwide societal collapse in the...