18 October 2016 (JPL) – A new NASA and university study using NASA satellite data finds that tide gauges — the longest and highest-quality records of historical ocean water levels — may have underestimated the amount of global average sea level rise that occurred during the 20th century. A research team led by Philip Thompson, […]
By Craig Welch8 November 2016 (National Geographic) – The tufted puffins started washing ashore on St. Paul Island in mid-October—first a handful, then dozens, then so many that volunteers patrolling to collect dead birds began walking their four-wheelers rather than riding. It was easier than getting off every few feet. The hundreds of dead, emaciated […]
By David Archer17 November 2016 (RealClimate) – The recent US election has prompted cries that the decision on Earth’s climate has now been irrevocably made, that the US has unilaterally decided to scrap the peak warming target from the Paris agreement of 1.5oC. What do the numbers say? Is Earth’s climate now irrevocably fracked? The […]
By Matt Stevens18 November 2016 (Los Angeles Times) – The number of dead trees in California’s drought-stricken forests has risen dramatically to more than 102 million in what officials described as an unparalleled ecological disaster that heightens the danger of massive wildfires and damaging erosion. Officials said they were alarmed by the increase in dead […]
By Marianne Lavelle16 November 2016 (InsideClimate News) – President-elect Donald Trump has famously called climate change a hoax invented by the Chinese, but the man he has chosen as his chief White House strategist advances a far more elaborate conspiracy. Stephen Bannon has called government support of alternative energy “madness.” His conservative website, Breitbart News, […]
By Alex Harris18 November 2016 (Miami Herald) – The canary in the coal mine once served as a natural warning system in a bygone industrial era. Now, for Florida at least, maybe it ought to be the octopus in the parking garage. Photos of an octopus splayed out in a flooded Miami Beach parking garage […]
By Jess_Shankleman16 November 2016 (Bloomberg News) – China couldn’t have invented global warming as a hoax to harm U.S. competitiveness because it was Donald Trump’s Republican predecessors who started climate negotiations in the 1980s, China’s Vice Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin said. U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush supported the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate […]
By Chris Mooney and Jason Samenow 17 November 2016 (Washington Post) – Political people in the United States are watching the chaos in Washington in the moment. But some people in the science community are watching the chaos somewhere else — the Arctic. It’s polar night there now — the sun isn’t rising in much […]
26 July 2016 (Potsdam Institute) – Climate disasters like heat-waves or droughts enhance the risk of armed conflicts in countries with high ethnic diversity, scientists found. They used a novel statistical approach to analyze data from the past three decades. While each conflict is certainly the result of a complex and specific mix of factors, […]
By Andy Coghlan16 November 2016 (New Scientist) – It’s not just polar bears that are suffering as Arctic sea ice retreats. Tens of thousands of reindeer in Arctic Russia starved to death in 2006 and 2013 because of unusual weather linked to global warming. The same conditions in the first half of November led to […]